“We’ve got to cut it!” said Emma.
   “And get fried to a crisp? I don’t think so.”
   “Then how do we seal the hatch?” Luther said, “Pull back! Pull back into the lab! We’ll close off the whole node. Isolate this end of the station.” Griggs looked at the sparking wire. He didn’t want to close off Node 2, because it meant sacrificing both the NASDA and European modules, which would be completely depressurized and unreachable. And it meant sacrificing the shuttle docking port, which also led off Node 2.
   “Pressure’s dropping, folks!” called Diana, reading a handheld pressure gauge. “We’re down to six hundred twenty-five millimeters! Just pull the fuck back, and let’s close off the node!” Emma could already feel herself breathing faster, trying to catch her breath. Hypoxia. They were all going to black out if she didn’t do something soon.
   She tugged Griggs’s arm. “Pull back! It’s the only way to save the station!” He gave a stunned nod and retreated with Emma into the U.S. Lab.
   Luther tried to tug the hatch shut, but he couldn’t get it to budge. Now that they were outside Node 2, they had to pull, not push the hatch shut. And they were working against the rush of escaping air, in a rapidly depressurizing atmosphere.
   “We’ll have to abandon this module too!” yelled Luther. “Retreat to Node 1 and close off the next hatch!”
   “Hell no!” Griggs said. “I’m not giving up this module as well!”
   “Griggs, we’ve got no choice. I can’t pull this hatch shut!”
   “Then let me do it!” Griggs grabbed the handle and strained to pull it shut, but the hatch moved only a few inches before he had to let go in exhaustion.
   “You’re gonna kill us all just to save this fucking module!” shouted Luther.
   It was Nicolai who suddenly yelled out the solution. “Mir! Feed the leak! Feed the leak!” He shot out of the lab, headed toward the Russian end of the station.
   Mir. Every one immediately knew what he was talking about. 1997. The collision with Mir’s Spektra module. There had been a breach in the hull, and Mir had begun to leak its precious air into space. The Russians, with years more experience in manned space stations, were ready with their emergency response, feeding the leak. Pour extra oxygen into the module to raise the pressure.
   Not only would it buy them time to work, it might narrow the pressure gradient enough so they could pull the hatch shut.
   Nicolai came flying back into the lab with two oxygen tanks.
   Frantically he opened the valves all the way. Even over the screaming sirens, they could hear the screech of air escaping from tanks. Nicolai tossed both tanks into Node 2. Feeding the leak. They were building air pressure on the other side of the hatch.
   They were also pouring oxygen into a module with a live wire, thought Emma, remembering the sparks. It could trigger an explosion.
   “Now!” Nicolai shouted. “Try to close the hatch!” Luther and Griggs both grabbed the handle and pulled. They would never know if it was due to their combined desperation or if the oxygen tanks had succeeded in dropping the pressure gradient across that hatchway, but the hatch slowly began to swing shut.
   Griggs locked it in place.
   For a moment he and Luther simply hung limp in midair, both of them too exhausted to say a word. Then Griggs turned, his face bright with sweat in the flashing lights.
   “Now let’s shut off that fucking racket,” he said.
   The Thinkpad was still floating where he’d left it in Node 1. Peering at the glowing screen, he rapidly tapped in a series of commands. To everyone’s relief, the sirens stopped screaming. flashing red lights also stopped, leaving only a constant yellow glow on the caution-and-warning panels. At last they could communicate without shouting.
   “Air pressure is back up to six hundred ninety and rising,” he said, and gave a laugh of relief. “Looks like we’re home free.”
   “Why are we still at Class 3 caution?” asked Emma, pointing to the yellow light on the screen. A Class 3 caution meant one of three possibilities. Their backup guidance computer was down, one of their control motion gyros was inoperative, or they’d lost their S-band radio link to Mission Control.
   Griggs tapped a few more keys. “It’s the S-band. We’ve lost it. Discovery must have hit our P-1 truss and taken out the radio. Looks like they also hit our port solar arrays. We’ve lost a photovoltaic module. That’s why we’re still in power down.”
   “Houston must be going bonkers, wondering what’s happening,” said Emma.
   “And now they can’t reach us. What about Discovery? What’s happened to them?” Diana, already working the space-to-space radio, said, “Discovery isn’t responding. They may be out of UHF range.” Or they were all dead and couldn’t respond.
   “Can we get these lights back?” said Luther. “Cross-strap primary power?” Griggs began to tap on the keyboard again. Part of the beauty of ISS’s design lay in its redundancy. Each of its power channels were configured to supply electricity for specific loads, but channels could be rerouted—”cross-strapped”—as needed.
   Though they’d lost one photovoltaic module, they had three others to tap into.
   Griggs said, “I know this is a cliche, but let there be light.” He hit a computer key, and the module lights barely brightened. But was enough to navigate through hatchways. “I’ve rerouted power. Nonessential payload functions are now off the grid.” He released a deep breath and looked at Nicolai. “We need to contact Houston. It’s your show, Nicolai.”
   The Russian understood at once what he had to do. Moscow’s Mission Control maintained its own separate communications link with the station. The collision should not have affected the end of ISS. Nicolai gave a terse nod. “Let us hope Moscow has paid its electric bill.”

   Jill Hewitt was gasping in pain, short little whimpers that punctuated every push of a new button on the control panel. Her head felt like a melon ripe to explode. Her field of vision had so narrowed that it seemed as if she were peering down a long black tunnel and the controls had receded almost beyond her reach. It took every ounce of concentration for her to focus on each switch she had to flip, on each button wavering beyond her finger. Now she struggled to make out the attitude-direction indicator, her vision blurring as the eight-ball display seemed to spin wildly in its casing.
   I can’t see it. I can’t read pitch or yaw …
   “Discovery, you are at entry interface,” said Capcom. “Body flap on auto.” Jill squinted at the panel and reached for the switch, but it seemed so far away… “Discovery?” Her trembling finger made contact. She switched to “auto.”
   “Confirm,” she whispered, and let her shoulders go slack. The computers were now in control, flying the ship. She did not trust herself on the stick. She did not even know how long she could remain conscious. Already the black tunnels were closing over her vision, swallowing the light. For the first time she could hear the sound rushing air across the hull, could feel her body being shoved back against her seat.
   Capcom had gone silent. She was in communications blackout, the spacecraft hurtling against the atmosphere with such force it stripped the electrons from air molecules. That electromagnetic storm interrupted all radio waves, cut off all communication. For the next twelve minutes it was only her, and the ship, and the roaring air.
   She had never felt so alone.
   She felt the autopilot begin to steer into the first high bank, rolling the spacecraft on its side, slowing it down. She imagined glow of heat on the cockpit windows, could feel its warmth, like the sun radiating on her face.
   She opened her eyes. And saw only darkness.
   Where are the lights? she thought. Where is the glow on the window?
   She blinked, again and again. Rubbed her eyes, as though to force them to see, to force her retinas to draw in light. She reached out toward the control panel. Unless she flipped the right switches, unless she deployed the air-data probes and lowered the landing gear, Houston could not land the ship. They could not get her alive. Her fingers brushed against a mind-numbing array of dials and buttons, and she gave a howl of despair.
   She was blind.

   At 4,093 feet above sea level, the air at White Sands Missile Proving Grounds was dry and thin. The landing strip traced across ancient dried-out seabed located in a desert valley formed between the Sacramento and Guadalupe mountain ranges to the east, and the San Andres Mountains to the west. The closest town was Alamogordo, New Mexico. The terrain was stark and arid, and only the hardiest of desert vegetation could survive.
   The area had long served as a training base for fighter pilots. It had also seen other uses through the decades. During World War II, it was the site of a German prisoner of war camp. It was also location of the Trinity site, where the U.S. exploded its first bomb, assembled not far away in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
   Barbed wire and unmarked government buildings had sprouted up in this desert valley, their functions a mystery even to the base of nearby Alamogordo.
   Through binoculars, Jack could see the landing strip shimmering with heat in the distance. Runway 16/34 was oriented just slightly off due north-south. It was fifteen thousand feet long three hundred feet wide—large enough to accept the heaviest of jets, even in that rarefied air, which forces long landing and rolls.
   Just west of the touchdown point, Jack and the medical team waited, along with a small convoy of NASA and United Space Alliance vehicles, for Discovery’s arrival. They had stretchers, oxygen, defibrillators, and ACLS kits—everything one could find in a modern ambulance, and more. For landings at Kennedy, there would be over one hundred fifty ground team members prepared to meet the orbiter. Here, on this desert strip, they had barely dozen, and eight of them were medical personnel.
   Some of the ground crew were wearing self-contained atmospheric protective suits, to insulate them from any propellant leaks. They would be the first to meet the orbiter and, with atmospheric sensors, quickly assess the potential for explosions before allowing doctors and nurses to approach.
   A distant rumble made Jack lower his binoculars and glance due east.
   Choppers were approaching, so many of them they looked like an ominous swarm of black wasps.
   “What’s this?” said Bloomfeld, also noticing the choppers. Now the rest of the ground crew was staring at the sky, many of them murmuring in bewilderment.
   “Could be backup,” said Jack.
   The convoy leader, listening on his comm unit, shook his head.
   “Mission Control says they’re not ours.”
   “This airspace should be clear,” said Bloomfeld.
   “We’re trying to hail the choppers, but they’re not responding.” The rumble had crescendoed, and Jack could feel it in his bones now, a deep and constant thrum in his sternum. They were going to invade the orbiter’s airspace. In fifteen minutes, Discovery would drop out of the sky and find those choppers in her flight path. He could hear the convoy leader talking urgently into his headset, could feel panic begin to ripple through the ground crew.
   “They’re holding position,” said Bloomfeld.
   Jack raised his binoculars. He counted almost a dozen choppers.
   They had indeed halted their approach and were now landing like a flock of vultures, due east of the orbiter’s touchdown point.
   “What do you suppose that’s all about?” said Bloomfeld.
   Two minutes left of communications blackout. Fifteen minutes till touchdown.
   Randy Carpenter was feeling the first flush of optimism. He knew they could bring Discovery down safely. Barring a catastrophic computer failure, they could fly that bird from the ground.
   The key was Hewitt. She had to stay conscious, had to be able to flip two switches at the right times. Minimal tasks, but crucial. their last radio contact, ten minutes before, Hewitt had sounded alert, but in pain. She was a good pilot, a woman with a steel backbone tempered by the refiner’s fire of the U.S. Navy. All she had to do was stay conscious.
   “Flight, we have good news from NASCOM,” said Ground Control. “Mission Control Moscow has made radio contact with ISS on Regul S-Band.” Regul was the Russian S-band radio system aboard ISS. It was completely separate and independent of the U.S. system, and it operated via Russian ground stations and their LUCH satellite.
   “Contact was brief. They were on the tail end of LUCH satellite comm pass,” said Ground Control. “But the crew is all alive and well.” Carpenter’s optimism flared even brighter, and he tightened his plump fingers in a triumphant fist. “Damage report?”
   “They had a breach of the NASDA module and had to close off Node Two and everything forward of that. They’ve also lost two solar arrays and several truss segments. But no one’s hurt.”
   “Flight, we should be coming out of comm blackout,” said Capcom.
   At once Carpenter’s attention snapped back to Discovery. He was happy about the news from ISS, but his first responsibility to the shuttle.
   “Discovery, do you copy?” said Capcom. “Discovery?”
   The minutes went by. Too many. Suddenly Carpenter was back dancing on the brink of panic.
   Guidance said, “Second S-turn completed. All systems look good.” Then why wasn’t Hewitt responding?
   “Discovery,” repeated Capcom, his voice now urgent. “Do you copy?”
   “Going into third S-turn,” said Guidance.
   We’ve lost her, thought Carpenter.
   Then they heard her voice. Soft and unsteady. “This is Discovery.
   Capcom’s sigh of relief huffed loudly over the loop. “Discovery, welcome back! It’s good to hear your voice! Now you need to deploy your air-data probes.”
   “I—I’m trying to find the switches.”
   “Your air-data probes,” Capcom repeated.
   “I know, I know! I can’t see the panel!” Carpenter felt as if his blood had just frozen in his veins. Dear God, she’s blind. And she’s seated in the commander’s seat. Not her own.
   “Discovery, you need to deploy now!” said Capcom. “Panel C-three—”
   “I know which panel!” she cried. There was silence. Then the sound of her breath rushing out in a whoosh of pain.
   “Probes have been deployed,” said MMACS. “She did it. She found the switch!” Carpenter allowed himself to breathe again. To hope again.
   “Fourth S-turn,” said Guidance. “Now at TAEM interface.”
   “Discovery, how ya doing?” said Capcom.
   One minute, thirty seconds to touchdown. Discovery was now traveling at six hundred miles per hour, at an altitude of eight thousand feet and dropping rapidly. The pilots called it the “flying brick”—heavy, with no engines, gliding in on delta-wing slivers.
   There’d be no second chances, no abort and fly around for another try.
   It was going to land, one way or the other.
   “Discovery?” said Capcom.
   Jack could see it glinting in the sky, puffs of smoke trailing yaw jets. It looked like a bright chip of silver as it swept its final turn to line up with the runway.
   “Come on, baby. You’re lookin’ good!” whooped Bloomfeld.
   His enthusiasm was shared by all three dozen members of the ground crew.
   Every shuttle landing is a celebratory event, a so moving it brings tears to the eyes of those who watch from the ground. Every eye was now turned to the sky, every heart pounding as they watched that chip of silver, their baby, gliding toward the runway.
   “Gorgeous. God, she’s beautiful!”
   “Yee-haw!”
   “Linin’ up just fine! Yes sir!” The convoy leader, listening on his earpiece to Houston, suddenly snapped straight, his spine rigid in alarm. “Oh, shit,” he said.
   “Landing gear isn’t down!” Jack turned to him. “What?”
   “Crew hasn’t deployed the landing gear!” Jack’s head whipped around to stare at the approaching shuttle.
   It was barely one hundred feet above the ground, moving at over three hundred miles an hour. He could not see the wheels.
   The crowd suddenly went dead silent. Their celebration had just turned into disbelief. Horror.
   Get them down. Get those wheels down! Jack wanted to scream.
   The shuttle was seventy-five feet above the runway, lined up perfectly.
   Ten seconds till touchdown.
   Only the flight crew could lower the landing gear. No computer could flip the switch, could perform the task meant for a human hand. No computer could save them.
   Fifty feet and still traveling over two hundred miles an hour.
   Jack did not want to see the final event, but he could not help himself.
   He could not turn away. He saw Discovery’s tail slam down first, spewing up a shower of sparks and shattered heat tiles.
   He heard the screams and sobs of the crowd as Discovery’s nose slammed down next. The shuttle began to slide sideways, trailing a maelstrom of debris. A delta wing broke off, went flying like a black scythe through the air.
   Discovery slid off the tarmac, onto the desert sand. A tornado of dust flew up, obscuring Jack’s view of the final seconds. His ears rang with the crowd’s screams, but he could not utter a sound. Nor could he move, shock had numbed him so profoundly he felt as if he had left his own body and were hovering, ghostlike, in some nightmare dimension.
   Then the cloud of dust began to clear, and he saw the shuttle. Lying like a broken bird, in a terrible landscape of scattered debris.
   Suddenly the ground convoy was moving. As engines roared to life, Jack and Bloomfeld jumped in back of the medical vehicle and began the bouncing ride across the desert floor to the crash site.

   Even over the roar of the convoy engines, Jack heard another sound, throbbing and ominous.
   The choppers were moving in too.
   Their vehicle suddenly braked to a halt. Jack and Bloomfeld, both clutching emergency medical kits, jumped to the ground in a cloud of dust. Discovery was still a hundred yards ahead. The choppers had already landed, forming a ring around the shuttle.
   Jack began to run toward Discovery, ready to duck his head beneath the whirring rotor blades. He was stopped before he reached the ring of choppers.
   “What the hell is going on?” yelled Bloomfeld as uniformed soldiers suddenly poured out of the choppers and formed an armed wall against the NASA ground crew.
   “Back off! Back off!” one of the soldiers yelled.
   The convoy leader pushed to the front. “My crew needs to get to the orbiter!”
   “You people will stay back!”
   “You have no authority here! This is a NASA operation!”
   “Every one get the fuck back now!” Rifles suddenly came up, barrels pointed at the unarmed ground crew. NASA personnel began to back away, all eyes focused on the guns, on the implied threat of mass slaughter.
   Looking past the soldiers, Jack saw that a white plastic tent was rapidly being erected over Discovery’s hatch, closing it off from outside air. A dozen hooded figures, completely clad in bright orange suits, emerged from two of the choppers and approached the orbiter.
   “Those are Racal biological space suits,” said Bloomfeld.
   The orbiter hatch was now completely hidden by the plastic tent. They could not see the hatch being opened. They could not see those space-suited men enter the middeck.
   That’s our flight crew in there, thought Jack. Our people who might be dying in that orbiter. And we can’t reach them. We’ve doctors and nurses standing here, with a truck full of medical equipment, and they won’t let us do our jobs.
   He pushed toward the line of soldiers, stepping directly in front of the Army officer who appeared to be in charge. “My medical crew is coming in,” he said.
   The officer gave a smirk. “I don’t think so, sir.”
   “We’re employees of NASA. We’re doctors, charged with the health and well-being of that flight crew. You can shoot us if you’d like. But then you’d have to kill everyone else here too, because they’d be witnesses. And I don’t think you’re going to do that.” The rifle came up, the barrel pointed directly at Jack’s chest. throat was dry, and his heart was slamming against his ribs, but stepped around the soldier, ducked under the chopper blades, and kept walking.
   He didn’t even glance back as the soldier ordered, “Halt, or I’ll shoot!” He walked on, his gaze fixed on the billowing tent ahead of him.
   He saw the men in their Racal space suits turn and stare at him in surprise. He saw the wind kick up a puff of dust and send swirling across his path. He was almost at the tent when he heard Bloomfeld yell, “Jack, look out!” The blow caught him right at the base of the skull. He went down on his knees, pain exploding in bright bursts in his head.
   Another blow slammed into his flank, and he sprawled forward, tasting sand, hot as ash in his face. He rolled over, onto his back, and saw the soldier looming over him, rifle butt raised to deliver yet another blow.
   “That’s enough,” said an oddly muffled voice. “Leave him alone.” The soldier backed away. Now another face loomed into view, staring down at Jack through a clear Racal hood.
   “Who are you?” the man said.
   “Dr. Jack McCallum.” The words came out in barely a whisper.
   He sat up, and his vision suddenly blurred, danced on the edge of darkness. He clutched his head, willing himself to stay conscious, fighting the blackness threatening to drag him down. “Those are my patients in that orbiter,” Jack said. “I demand to see them.”
   “That’s not possible.”
   “They need medical attention—”
   “They’re dead, Dr. McCallum. All of them.” Jack froze. Slowly he raised his head and met the man’s gaze through the clear face shield. He could read no expression there, could see nothing that reflected the tragedy of four lost lives.
   “I’m sorry about your astronauts,” the man said, and turned to walk away.
   Jack struggled to stand up. Though swaying and dizzy, he managed to stay on his feet. “And who the fuck are you?” he demanded.
   The man paused and turned back. “I’m Dr. Isaac Roman, USAMRIID,” he said. “That orbiter is now a hot zone. The Army is assuming control.”
   USAMRIID. Dr. Roman had pronounced it as one word, but Jack knew what the letters stood for. The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Why was the Army here? Since when had this turned into a military operation?
   Jack squinted in the flying dust, his skull still ringing from the blow, and struggled to absorb this bewildering information. An eternity seemed to pass, a surreal progression of images in slow motion. Men in Racal suits striding toward the orbiter. The staring at him with expressionless eyes. The isolation tent in the wind like a living, breathing organism. He looked at the of soldiers, still holding the ground crew at bay. He looked at orbiter and saw the men in space suits carry the first stretcher of the tent. The body was sealed in a bag. The plastic had been stamped repeatedly with the bright red biohazard symbol, like blossoms strewn across a corpse.
   The sight of that stretcher made Jack’s mind snap back into focus. He said, “Where are you taking the bodies?” Dr. Roman did not even turn to look at him, but directed the stretcher to a waiting chopper. Jack started to walk toward the orbiter, and once again found a soldier standing in front of him, rifle butt raised to deliver another blow.
   “Hey!” came a shout from the ground crew. “You dare to hit him again and we’ve got thirty witnesses!” The soldier turned and stared at the angry NASA and United Space Alliance employees, who were now surging forward, voices raised in outrage.
   “You think this is Nazi Germany?”
   “—think you can beat up civilians now?”
   “Who the hell are you guys?” The nervous soldiers tightened ranks as the ground crew continued to push forward, shouting, feet churning up dust.
   A rifle shot exploded into the air. The crowd went dead still.
   There is something terribly wrong here, thought Jack. Something we don’t understand. These soldiers were fully prepared to shoot. To kill.
   The convoy leader understood this as well, because he blurted out in panic, “I’m in comm link with Houston! At this moment, a hundred men and women in Mission Control are listening!” Slowly the soldiers lowered their rifles and glanced toward their officer. A long silence passed, broken only by the wind and the scatter shot of sand pinging the choppers.
   Dr. Roman appeared at Jack’s side. “You people don’t understand the situation,” he said.
   “Explain it to us.”
   “We are dealing with a serious biohazard. The White House Security Council has activated the Army’s Biological Rapid Response Team—a team created by an act of Congress, Dr. McCallum. We’re here on orders from the White House.”
   “What biohazard?” Roman hesitated. He glanced toward the NASA ground crew, who stood in a tense huddle beyond the line of soldiers.
   “What is the organism?” Jack said.
   At last Roman met his gaze through the plastic face shield.
   “That information is classified.”
   “We’re the medical team, charged with the health of that flight crew. Why weren’t we told about this?”
   “NASA doesn’t realize what it’s dealing with.”
   “And how is it that you do?” The question, heavy with significance, went unanswered.
   Another stretcher emerged from the tent. And whose body was that? Jack wondered. The faces of the four crew members flashed through his mind.
   All dead now. He could not grasp that fact. He could not imagine those vibrant, healthy people reduced to shattered bones and ruptured organs.
   “Where are you taking the bodies?” he asked.
   “A Level Four facility for autopsy.”
   “Who’s doing the autopsy?”
   “I am.”
   “As the crew’s flight surgeon, I should be present.”
   “Why? Are you a pathologist?”
   “No.”
   “Then I don’t see how you could contribute anything useful.”
   “How many dead pilots have you examined?” Jack shot back. “How many aircraft accidents have you investigated? Aerospace trauma is my training. My field of expertise. You might need me.”
   “I don’t think so,” said Roman. And he walked away.
   Stiff with rage, Jack crossed back to the NASA ground crew and said to Bloomfeld, “The Army’s in control of this site. They’re taking the bodies.”
   “By what authority?”
   “He says it comes straight from the White House. They’ve activated something called a Biological Rapid Response Team.”
   “That’s an antiterrorist team,” said Bloomfeld. “I’ve heard about them.
   They were created to deal with bioterrorism.” They watched a chopper lift off, carrying two of the bodies.
   What the hell is really going on? Jack wondered. What are they hiding from us?
   He turned to the convoy leader. “Can you patch me through to JSC?”
   “Any one in particular?” Jack thought of whom he could trust, and who was high enough in the NASA bureaucracy to carry the battle to the very top.
   “Get me Gordon Obie,” he said. “Flight Crew Operations.”

The Autopsy

   Gordon Obie walked into the video conference room prepared for bloody battle, but none of the officials sitting around the table suspected the depth of his rage. And no wonder, Obie was wearing usual poker face, and he didn’t say a word as he took his place at the table, next to a tearful and puffy-eyed Public Affairs Officer Gretchen Liu. Every one looked shell-shocked. They didn’t even notice Gordon’s entrance.
   Also at the table was NASA administrator Leroy Cornell, JSC director Ken Blankenship, and a half dozen senior NASA officials, all of them grimly staring at the two video display screens. On the first screen was a Colonel Lawrence Harrison from USAMRIID, speaking from the Army base in Fort Detrick, Maryland. On the second monitor was a solemn, dark-haired man in civilian clothes, identified as
   “Jared Profitt, White Security Council.” He did not look like a bureaucrat. With his mournful eyes and his gaunt, almost ascetic features, he looked like a medieval monk, unwillingly transported into a modern age of suits and ties.
   Blankenship was talking, his comments directed at Colonel Harrison. “Not only did your soldiers prevent my people from doing their jobs, they threatened them at gunpoint. One of our flight surgeons was assaulted—knocked to the ground with a rifle butt. We have three dozen witnesses—”
   “Dr. McCallum broke through our security cordon. He refused to halt as ordered,” Colonel Harrison responded. “We had a hot zone to protect.”
   “So now the U.S. Army is prepared to attack, even shoot, civilians?”
   “Ken, let’s try to look at it from USAMRIID’s point of view,” said Cornell, placing a calming hand on Blankenship’s arm. The diplomat’s touch, thought Gordon with distaste. Cornell might be NASA’s spokesman at the White House and their best asset when it came to cajoling Congress for money, but many at NASA had never really trusted him.
   They could never trust any man who thought more like a politician than an engineer. “Protecting a hot zone is valid reason to apply force,” said Cornell. “Dr. McCallum did breach the security line.”
   “And the results could have been disastrous,” said Harrison over the audio feed. “Our intelligence reports that Marburg virus may have been purposefully introduced to the space station. Marburg is a cousin of Ebola virus.”
   “How would it get aboard?” said Blankenship. “Every experimental protocol is reviewed for safety. Every lab animal is healthy. We don’t send up biohazards.”
   “That’s your agency line, of course. But you receive your experimental payloads from scientists all around the country. You screen their protocols, but you can’t examine every bacteria or culture as it arrives for launch. To keep biological materials alive, the payloads are loaded right onto the shuttle. What if one of those experiments was contaminated? Consider how easy it is to replace harmless culture with a dangerous organism like Marburg.”
   “Are you saying this was a deliberate sabotage attempt on the station?” said Blankenship. “An act of bioterrorism?”
   “That’s precisely what I’m saying. Let me describe what happens to you if you are infected with this particular virus. First your muscles begin to ache and you have a fever. The ache is so severe, agonizing, you can scarcely bear to be touched. An intramuscular injection makes you shriek in pain. Then your eyes turn red. Your belly begins to hurt, and you vomit, again and again. You begin to throw up blood. It comes up black at first, because of digestive processes. Then it comes faster and turns bright red, as rapid as gushing pump. Your liver swells, cracks. Your kidneys fail. internal organs are being destroyed, turning to foul, black mush. And suddenly, disastrously, your blood pressure crashes. And you’re dead.” Harrison paused. “That’s what we may be dealing with, gentlemen.”
   “This is bullshit!” blurted Gordon Obie.
   Every one at the table stared at him in astonishment. The Sphinx had spoken. On the rare occasions Obie did say anything at a meeting, it was usually in a monotone, his words used to convey data and information, not emotion. This outburst had shocked them all.
   “May I ask who just spoke?” asked Colonel Harrison.
   “I’m Gordon Obie, director of Flight Crew Operations.”
   “Oh. The astronauts’ top dog.”
   “You could call me that.”
   “And why is this bullshit?”
   “I don’t believe this is Marburg virus. I don’t know what it is, but I do know you’re not telling us the truth.” Colonel Harrison’s face froze into a rigid mask. He said nothing.
   It was Jared Profitt who spoke. His voice sounded exactly as Gordon had expected, thin and reedy. He was not a bully like Harrison, but a man who preferred to appeal to one’s intellect and reason. “I understand your frustration, Mr. Obie,” Profitt said.
   “There’s so much we’re unable to tell you because of security concerns. But Marburg is not something we can be careless about.”
   “If you already know it’s Marburg, then why are you excluding our flight surgeons from the autopsy? Are you afraid we’ll learn the truth?”
   “Gordon,” Cornell said quietly, “why don’t we discuss this in private?” Gordon ignored him and said to the screen, “What disease are we really talking about? An infection? A toxin? Something loaded on board the shuttle in a military payload, perhaps?”
   There was a silence. Then Harrison blustered, “There’s that NASA paranoia! Your agency likes to blame the military for everything that goes wrong.”
   “Why do you refuse to allow my flight surgeon into the autopsy?”
   “Are we speaking of Dr. McCallum?” asked Profitt.
   “Yes. McCallum has training in aviation trauma and pathology. He is a flight surgeon as well as a former member of the astronaut corps. The fact you refuse to let him or any of our doctors view autopsies makes me wonder what you don’t want NASA to see.” Colonel Harrison glanced sideways, as though to look at someone else in the room. When he gazed back at the camera, his face was flushed and angry.
   “This is absurd. You people just crashed a shuttle! You screw up the landing, kill your own crew, and then point an accusing finger at the U.S. Army?”
   “The entire astronaut corps is up in arms about this,” said Gordon. “We want to know what really happened to our colleagues. We insist you allow one of our doctors to view the bodies.”
   Leroy Cornell again tried to intercede. “Gordon, you can’t make unreasonable demands like this,” he said quietly. “They know what they’re doing.”
   “So do I.”
   “I’m going to ask you to back down now.” Gordon looked Cornell in the eye. Cornell was NASA’s representative to the White House, NASA’s voice in Congress.
   Provoking him was career suicide.
   He did it anyway. “I speak for the astronauts,” he said. “My people.” He turned to the video screen, his gaze fixed on the face of Colonel Harrison. “And we’re not above taking our concerns to the press. We don’t consider this move lightly—exposing confidential NASA matters. The astronaut corps has always been discreet. But if we’re forced to, we will demand a public inquiry.”
   Gretchen Liu’s jaw dropped. “Gordon,” she whispered, “what the hell are you doing?”
   “What I have to do.” The silence at the table stretched to a full minute.
   Then, to everyone’s astonishment, Ken Blankenship said, “I side with our astronauts.”
   “So do I,” said another voice.
   “Me too—”
   “—and me.”
   Gordon looked around the table at his colleagues. Most of these people were engineers and operational managers whose names seldom turned up in the press. More often than not, they were in conflict with the astronauts, whom they considered flyboys with big egos. The astronauts got all the glory, but these men women, who performed the unseen and unglamorous jobs that made spaceflight a reality, were the heart and soul of NASA. And they were now united behind Gordon.
   Leroy Cornell looked stricken, the leader abandoned by his own troops.
   He was a proud man, and this was a humiliatingly public blow. He cleared his throat and slowly squared his shoulders.
   Then he faced the video image of Colonel Harrison. “I have no choice but to support my astronauts as well,” he said. “I insist one of our flight surgeons be allowed to view the autopsies.” Colonel Harrison said nothing. It was Jared Profitt who made the final decision—Jared Profitt who was obviously the real man in charge. He turned to confer with someone standing offscreen.
   Then he looked at the camera and nodded.
   Both screens went blank. The video conference had ended.
   “Well, you certainly thumbed your nose at the U.S. Army,” said Gretchen. “Did you see how pissed-off Harrison looked?” No, thought Gordon, remembering Colonel Harrison’s expression just before the image went blank. That wasn’t anger I saw on his face. It was fear.
   The bodies had not been taken to USAMRIID headquarters in Fort Detrick, Maryland, as Jack had expected. They’d been transported barely sixty miles away from the White Sands landing strip to a windowless concrete-block building, much like the dozens of other anonymous government buildings that had sprung up in that dry desert valley. But this one had a distinguishing feature, a series of ventilation pipes jutting up from the roofline. Barbed wire atop the perimeter fence. As they drove through the military checkpoint, Jack heard the hum of high-voltage wires.
   Flanked by his armed escort, Jack approached the front entrance—the only entrance, he realized. On the door was a chillingly familiar symbol, the bright red biohazard blossom. What this facility doing in the middle of nowhere? he wondered. Then scanned the featureless horizon, and his question was answered.
   The building was here precisely because it was in the middle of nowhere.
   He was escorted through the door and into a series of stark corridors heading deeper into the heart of the building. He saw and women in Army uniforms, others in lab coats. All lighting was artificial, and the faces appeared bluish and sickly.
   The guards stopped outside a door labeled
   “Men’s Lockers.”
   “Go in,” he was told. “Follow the written instructions to the letter. Then go through the next door. They’re waiting for you.
   Jack entered the room. Inside were lockers, a laundry cart containing various sizes of green surgical scrub suits, a shelf paper caps, a sink, and a mirror. A list of instructions was on the wall, starting with “Remove ALL street clothes, including underwear.” He took off his clothes, left them in an unsecured locker, and dressed in a scrub suit.
   Then he pushed through the next door, labeled with the universal biohazard symbol, into an ultraviolet-lit room. There he paused, wondering what to do next.
   A voice over the intercom said, “There’s a shelf of socks beside you. Put on a pair and walk through the door.” He did.
   A woman in a scrub suit was waiting for him in the next room.
   She was brusque, unsmiling, as she told him to don sterile gloves.
   Then she angrily ripped off strips of tape and sealed his sleeves pant cuffs. The Army may have resigned themselves to Jack’s visit, but they weren’t going to make it a friendly one. She slipped an audio headset over his head, then gave him a “Snoopy” hat, like swimming cap, to hold the equipment in place.
   “Now suit up,” she barked.
   Time for the space suit. This one was blue, with the gloves already attached. As his hostile assistant lowered the hood over his head, Jack felt a dart of anxiety about the woman. In her anger, could she sabotage the process, see to it that he wasn’t completely sealed off from contamination.
   She closed the seal on his chest, hooked him up to a wall hose, and he felt the whoosh of air blow into his suit. It was too late to worry about what could go wrong. He was ready to cross into the hot area.
   The woman unplugged his hose and pointed to the next door. He stepped through, into the air lock. The door slammed shut behind him.
   A man in a space suit was waiting for him. He did not speak, but gestured to Jack to follow him through the far door.
   They stepped through and walked down a hallway to the autopsy room.
   Inside was a stainless steel table with a body on it, still sealed in its bag. Two men in space suits were already standing on either side of the body.
   One of the men was Dr. Roman. He turned and saw Jack.
   “Don’t touch anything. Don’t interfere. You’re only here to observe, Dr. McCallum, so stay the hell out of our way.” Nice welcome.
   The space-suited escort plugged a wall hose into Jack’s suit, and once again air hissed into his helmet. If not for the audio headset, he’d be unable to hear anything the other three men said.
   Dr. Roman and his two associates opened the body bag.
   Jack felt his breath catch, his throat constrict. The corpse was Jill Hewitt’s. Her helmet had been removed, but she was still wearing the orange launch-and-entry suit, embroidered with her name.
   Even without that identification, he would have known it was Jill, because of her hair. It was a silky chestnut, cut in a bob and with the first hints of gray. Her face was strangely intact. Her eyes were half open.
   Both sclerae were a bright and shocking red.
   Roman and his colleagues unzipped the LES and stripped the corpse. The fabric was fire-retardant, too tough to cut through.
   They had to peel it off. They worked efficiently, their comments matter-of-fact and without even a hint of emotion. When they had removed her clothing, she looked like a broken doll. Both her hands were deformed by fractures, reduced to masses of crushed bone. Her legs, too, were broken and akilter, the shins bent at impossible angles. The tips of two broken ribs penetrated her wall, and black bruises marked the strap lines of her seat restraint.
   Jack felt his breaths coming too fast, and he had to quell his rising horror. He had witnessed many autopsies, on bodies in much worse shape.
   He had seen aviators burned into little more than charred twigs, skulls exploded from the pressure of cooking brains.
   He had seen a corpse whose face had been sliced off from walking into a chopper’s tail rotor. He had seen a Navy pilot’s spine in half and folded backward from ejecting through a closed canopy.
   This was far, far worse because he knew the deceased. He remembered her as a living, breathing woman. His horror was mingled with rage, because these three men viewed Jill’s exposed body with such cold dispassion. She was a slab of meat on the table, nothing more. They ignored her injuries, her grotesquely positioned limbs. The cause of death was only of secondary concern to them.
   They were more interested in the microbiological hitchhiker harbored within her corpse.
   Roman began his Y incision. In one hand he gripped a scalpel, the other hand was safely encased in a steel-mesh glove. One slash ran from the right shoulder, diagonally through the breast, to the xiphoid process. Another diagonal slash ran from the left shoulder and met the first slash at the xiphoid. The incision continued straight down the abdomen, with a small jag around the umbilicus, ending near the pubic bone. He cut through the ribs, freeing the sternum. The bony shield was lifted to reveal the chest cavity.
   The cause of death was immediately apparent.
   When a plane crashes, or an automobile slams into a wall, or a despondent lover makes a suicide leap from a ten-story building, the same forces of deceleration apply. A human body traveling at great speed is abruptly brought to a halt. The impact itself can shatter and send missiles of bone shards into vital organs. It can vertebrae, rupture spinal cords, crush skulls against dashboards instrument panels. But even when pilots are fully strapped in and helmeted, even when no part of their body makes contact with the aircraft, the force of deceleration alone can be fatal, because although the torso may be restrained, the internal organs are not.
   The heart and lungs and great vessels are suspended inside the by only tissue attachments. When the torso comes to an abrupt halt, the heart continues to swing forward like a pendulum, moving with such force it shears tissues and rips open the aorta. Blood into the mediastinum and pleural cavity.
   Jill Hewitt’s chest was a lake of blood.
   Roman suctioned it out, then frowned at the heart and lungs. “I can’t see where she bled out,” he said.
   “Why don’t we remove the entire block?” said his assistant.
   “We’d have better visibility.”
   “The tear is most likely in the ascending aorta,” said Jack. “Sixty-five percent of the time, it’s located just above the valve.”
   Roman glanced at him in annoyance. Up till then, he’d managed to ignore Jack, now he resented this intrusive comment. Without a word, he positioned his scalpel to sever the great vessels.
   “I advise examining the heart in situ first,” said Jack. “Before you cut.”
   “How and where she bled out is not my primary concern,” Roman retorted.
   They don’t really care what killed her, thought Jack. All they want to know is what organism might be growing, multiplying, inside her.
   Roman sliced through the trachea, esophagus, and great vessels, then removed the heart and lungs in one block. The lungs were covered with hemorrhages. Traumatic or infectious? Jack didn’t know. Next Roman examined the abdominal organs. The small bowel, like the lungs, was splotchy with mucosal hemorrhages. He removed it and set the glistening coils of intestines in bowl. He resected the stomach, pancreas, and liver. All would sectioned and examined microscopically. All tissue would be cultured for bacteria and viruses.
   The body was now missing almost all its internal organs. Jill Hewitt, Navy pilot, triathlete, lover of J&B scotch and high-stakes poker and Jim Carrey movies, was now nothing but a hollow shell.
   Roman straightened, looking vaguely relieved. So far, the autopsy had revealed nothing unexpected. If there was gross evidence of Marburg virus, Jack did not see it.
   Roman circled behind the corpse, to the head.
   This was the part Jack dreaded. He had to force himself to watch as Roman sliced the scalp, his incision running across the top of the crown, from ear to ear. He peeled the scalp forward folded the flap over the face, a fringe of chestnut hair flopping down over her chin. With a rongeur, they cracked the skull. No saws, no flying bone dust, could be allowed in a Level 4 autopsy. They pried off the cap of bone.
   A fist-sized mass of clotted blood plopped out, splattering the stainless steel table.
   “Big subdural hematoma,” said one of Roman’s associates.
   “From the trauma?”
   “I don’t think so,” said Roman. “You saw the aorta—death would have been nearly instantaneous on impact. I’m not sure her heart was pumping long enough to produce this much intracranial bleeding.” Gently he slid his gloved fingers into the cranial cavity, probing the surface of gray matter. A gelatinous mass slithered out and splashed onto the table.
   Roman jerked back, startled.
   “What the hell is that?” his assistant said.
   Roman didn’t answer. He just stared at the clump of tissue. It was covered with a blue-green membrane. Through the glistening veil, the mass appeared irregular, a knot of formless flesh. He was about to slit the membrane open, then he stopped himself and shot a glance toward Jack.
   “It’s a tumor of some kind,” he said. “Or cyst. That would explain the headache she reported.”
   “No it wouldn’t,” Jack spoke up. “Her headache came on suddenly—within hours. A tumor takes months to grow.”
   “How do you know she hasn’t been hiding her symptoms these past months?” countered Roman. “Keeping it a secret so she wouldn’t get scrubbed from the launch?”
   Jack had to concede that was a possibility. Astronauts were so eager for flight assignments they might well conceal any symptoms that would pull them from a mission.
   Roman looked at his associate standing across the table from him. The other man nodded, slid the mass into a specimen container, and carried it out of the room.
   “Aren’t you going to section it?” said Jack.
   “It needs to be fixed and stained first. If I start slicing now, could deform the cellular architecture.”
   “You don’t know if it is a tumor.”
   “What else would it be?” Jack had no answer. He had never seen anything like it.
   Roman continued his examination of Jill Hewitt’s cranial cavity.
   Clearly the mass, whatever it was, had increased pressure on her brain, deforming its structures. How long had it been there? Months, years? How was it possible that Jill had been able to function normally, much less pilot a complicated vehicle like the shuttle? All this raced through Jack’s head as he watched Roman remove the brain and slide it into a steel basin.
   “She was close to herniating through the tentorium,” said Roman.
   No wonder Jill had gone blind. No wonder she hadn’t lowered the landing gear. She had already been unconscious, her brain about to be squeezed like toothpaste out the base of her skull.
   Jill’s corpse—what remained of it—was sealed into a new body bag and wheeled out of the room, along with the biohazard containers holding her organs.
   A second body was brought in. It was Andy Mercer.
   With fresh gloves pulled over his space suit gloves, and a clean scalpel, Roman set to work on the Y incision. He was moving more quickly, as though Jill had just been the warm-up and he was only now hitting his stride.
   Mercer had complained of abdominal pain and vomiting, Jack remembered as he watched Roman’s scalpel slice through skin and subcutaneous fat.
   Mercer hadn’t complained of a headache, as Jill had, but he’d had a fever and had coughed up a little blood.
   Would his lungs show the effects of Marburg virus?
   Again, Roman’s diagonal cuts met below the xiphoid, and he sliced a shallow line down the abdomen to the pubis. Again he cut through the ribs, freeing up the triangular shield that covered the heart. He lifted the sternum.
   Gasping, he stumbled backward, dropping his scalpel. It clanged onto the table. His assistants stood frozen in disbelief.
   In Mercer’s chest cavity was a cluster of blue-green cysts, identical to the cyst in Jill Hewitt’s brain. They were massed around the heart, like tiny translucent eggs.
   Roman stood paralyzed, his gaze fixed on the gaping torso.
   Then his gaze shifted to the glistening peritoneal membrane. It distended, full of blood and bulging out through the abdominal incision.
   Roman stepped toward the body, staring at the outpouching of the peritoneal membrane. When he’d made his incision through the abdominal wall, his scalpel had nicked the surface of that membrane. A trickle of blood-tinged fluid leaked out. At first it was barely a few drops. Then, even as they watched, it began to trickle into a stream. The slit suddenly burst open into a gaping rent as blood gushed out, carrying with it a slippery flood of blue-green cysts.
   Roman gave a cry of horror as the cysts plopped onto the floor in splatters of blood and mucus.
   One of them skittered across the concrete and bumped against Jack’s rubber boot. He bent down, to touch it with his gloved hand.
   Abruptly he was yanked backward as Roman’s associates pulled him away from the table.
   “Get him out of here!” Roman ordered. “Get him out of the room!” The two men pushed Jack toward the door. He resisted, shoving away the gloved hand now grasping his shoulder. The man stumbled backward, tipped over a tray of surgical instruments, sprawled to the floor, slippery with cysts and blood.
   The second man wrenched Jack’s air hose from its connection and held up the kinked end. “I advise you to walk out with us, Dr. McCallum,” he said. “While you’ve still got breathable air.”
   “My suit! Jesus, I’ve got a breach!” It was the man who’d stumbled into the instrument tray. He was now staring in horror at a two-inch-long tear in his space suit sleeve—a sleeve that was coated with Mercer’s body fluids.
   “It’s wet. I can feel it. My inner sleeve is wet—”
   “Go!” barked Roman. “Decon now!” The man unplugged his suit and went running in panic out of the room. Jack followed him to the air lock door, and they both stepped through, into the decon shower. Water shot out of the overhead jets, pounding down like hard rain on their shoulders.
   Then the shower of disinfectant began, a torrent of green liquid that splattered noisily against their plastic helmets.
   When it finally stopped, they stepped through the next door and pulled off their suits. The man immediately peeled off his already wet scrub suit and thrust his arm under a faucet of running water, to rinse away any body fluids that had leaked through the sleeve.
   “You have any breaks in your skin?” asked Jack. “Cuts, hangnails?”
   “My daughter’s cat scratched me last night.”
   Jack looked down at the man’s arm and saw the claw marks, three scabbed lines raking up the inner arm. The same arm as the torn space suit. He looked at the man’s eyes and saw fear.
   “What happens now?” said Jack.
   “Quarantine. I go to lockup. Shit…”
   “I already know it’s not Marburg,” said Jack.
   The man released a deep breath. “No. It’s not.”
   “Then what is it? Tell me what we’re dealing with,” said Jack.
   The man clutched the sink with both hands and stared down at the water gurgling into the drain. He said softly, “We don’t know.”

   Sullivan Obie was riding his Harley on Mars.
   At midnight, with the full moon shining down and the pockmarked desert stretched out before him, he could imagine it was the Martian wind whipping his hair and red Martian dust churning beneath his tires. This was an old fantasy from boyhood, from the days when those precocious Obie brothers shot off homemade rockets and built cardboard moon landers and donned space suits of crinkled foil. The days when he and Gordie knew, just knew, their futures lay in the heavens.
   And this is where those big dreams end up, he thought. Drunk on tequila, popping wheelies in the desert. No way was he ever getting to Mars, or to the moon either. Chances were he wouldn’t get off the goddamn launchpad, but would be instantly atomized.
   A quick, spectacular death. What the hell, it beat dying at seventy-five with cancer.
   He skidded to a stop, his bike spitting up dirt, and stared the moonlit ripples of sand at Apogee II, gleaming like a streak silver, her nose cone pointed at the stars. They had moved her to the launchpad yesterday. It was a slow and celebratory procession, the dozen Apogee employees honking horns and beating on their car roofs as they followed the flatbed truck across the desert. she had finally been hoisted into position and everyone squinted up against the blazing sun to look at her, they had suddenly fallen silent.
   They all knew this was the last roll of the dice. In weeks, when Apogee II lifted off, she would be carrying all their hopes and dreams.
   And my sorry carcass as well, thought Sullivan.
   A chill shot through him as he realized he might be staring at his own coffin.
   He goosed the Harley and roared back toward the road, bouncing across dunes, leaping over dips. He rode with abandon, his recklessness fueled by tequila and by the sudden and unshakable certainty that he was already a dead man. That in three weeks he would be riding that rocket to oblivion. Until then, nothing touch him, nothing could hurt him.
   The promise of death had made him invincible.
   He accelerated, flying across the bleak moonscape of his boyhood fantasies. And here I am in the lunar rover, speeding across the Sea of Tranquility. Roaring up a lunar hill. Launching off to soft landing … He felt the ground drop away. Felt himself soaring through the night, the Harley growling between his knees, the moon shining in his eyes. Still soaring. How far? How high?
   The ground hit with such force he lost control and tumbled sideways, the Harley falling on top of him. For a moment he lay stunned, pinned between his bike and a flat rock. Well, this is fucking stupid position to be in, he thought.
   Then the pain hit him. Deep and grinding, as though his hips were crushed to splinters.
   He gave a cry and fell back, his face turned to the sky. The moon shone down, mocking him.

   “His pelvis is fractured in three places,” said Bridget. “The pinned it last night. They tell me he’s gonna be confined to bed at least six weeks.” Casper Mulholland could almost hear the sound of his dreams popping, like the loud burst of a balloon. “Six … weeks?
   “And then he’ll be in rehab for another three or four months.”
   “Four months?”
   “For God’s sake, Casper. Say something original.”
   “We’re screwed.” He slapped his palm against his forehead, as though to punish himself for daring to dream they could ever succeed. It was that old Apogee curse again, cutting them off at ankles just as they reached the finish line. Blowing up their rockets.
   Burning down their first office. And now, taking their only pilot of commission. He paced the waiting room, thinking, Nothing has ever gone right for us. They’d invested all their combined savings, their reputations, and the last thirteen years of their lives.
   God’s way of telling them to give up. To cut their losses before something really bad happened.
   “He was drunk,” said Bridget.
   Casper halted and turned to look at her. She stood with her arms grimly crossed, her red hair like the flaming halo of an avenging angel.
   “The doctors told me,” she said. “Blood alcohol level of point one nine. As pickled as a herring. This isn’t just our usual bad luck. This is our own dear Sully fucking up again. My only consolation that for the next six weeks, he’s gonna have a big tube stuck up his dick.”
   Without a word, Casper walked out of the visitors’ waiting room, headed up the hall, and pushed into Sullivan’s hospital room. “You moron,” he said.
   Sully looked up at him with morphine-glazed eyes. “Thanks for the sympathy.”
   “You don’t deserve any. Three weeks before launch and you pull some goddamn Chuck Yeager stunt in the desert? Why didn’t you just finish the job? Splatter your brains while you were at it? Hell, we wouldn’t have known the difference!” Sully closed his eyes.
   “I’m sorry.”
   “You always are.”
   “I screwed up. I know…”
   “You promised them a manned flight. It wasn’t my idea, it was yours. Now they’re expecting it. They’re excited about it. When was the last time any investor was excited about us? This could have made the difference. If you’d just kept the bottle corked—”
   “I was scared.”
   Sully had spoken so softly Casper wasn’t sure he’d heard him right.
   “What?” he said.
   “About the launch. Had a … bad feeling.” A bad feeling. Slowly Casper sank into the bedside chair, all his anger instantly dissolving.
   Fear is not something a man readily admits to. The fact that Sully, who regularly courted destruction, would confess to being afraid left Casper feeling shaken.
   And, at last, sympathetic.
   “You don’t need me for the launch,” said Sully.
   “They expect to see a pilot climb into that cockpit.”
   “You could put a goddamn monkey in my seat and they’d never know the difference. She doesn’t need a pilot, Cap. You can all the commands from the ground.” Casper sighed. They had no choice now, it would have to be an unmanned flight. Clearly they had a valid excuse not to launch Sully, but would the investors accept it? Or would they believe, instead, that Apogee had lost its nerve? That it lacked the confidence to risk a human life?
   “I guess I just lost my nerve,” said Sully softly. “Got to last night. Couldn’t stop…” Casper understood his partner’s fear—the way he understood how one defeat can lead inexorably to another and then another until the only certainty in a man’s life is failure. No wonder he was scared, he had lost faith in their dream. In Apogee.
   Maybe they all had.
   Casper said, “We can still make this launch work. Even without a monkey in the cockpit.”
   “Yeah. You could send up Bridget instead.”
   “Then who’d answer the phones?”
   “The monkey.” Both men laughed. They were like two old soldiers, mustering up a shred of cheer on the eve of certain defeat.
   “So we’re gonna do it?” said Sully. “We’re gonna launch?”
   “That was the whole idea of building a rocket.”
   “Well, then.” Sully took a deep breath, and a ghost of the old bravado returned to his face. “Let’s do it right. Press release the wire services. One mother of a tent party with champagne. Hell, invite my sainted brother and his NASA pals. If she blows on the pad, at least we’ll go outta business in style.”
   “Yeah. We always had an excess of style.” They grinned.
   Casper rose to leave. “Get better, Sully,” he said. “We’ll need you for Apogee III.”
   He found Bridget still sitting in the visitors’ waiting room. “So what happens now?” she said.
   “We launch on schedule.”
   “Unmanned?”
   He nodded. “We fly her from the control room.”
   To his surprise, she huffed out a sigh of relief. “Hallelujah!”
   “What’re you so happy about? Our man’s laid up in a hospital bed.”
   “Exactly.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and turned to leave.
   “It means he won’t be up there to fuck things up.”

August 11

   Nicolai Rudenko floated in the air lock, watching as Luther wriggled his hips into the lower torso assembly of the EVA suit.
   To the diminutive Nicolai, Luther was an exotic giant, with those broad shoulders and legs like pistons. And his skin! While Nicolai had turned pasty during his months aboard ISS, Luther was still a deep and polished brown, a startling contrast to the pale faces that inhabited their otherwise colorless world. Nicolai had already suited up, and now he hovered beside Luther, ready to assist his partner into the EVA suit’s upper torso assembly. They said little to each other, neither man was in the mood for idle chatter.
   The two of them had spent a mostly conversationless night sleeping in the air lock, allowing their bodies to adjust to an atmospheric pressure of 10.2 pounds per square inch—two thirds that of the space station. The pressure in their suits would be less, at 4.3. The suits could not be inflated any higher, or they would be too stiff and bulky, the joints impossible to flex.
   Going directly from a fully pressurized spacecraft into the lower air pressure of an EVA suit was like surfacing too fast from the depths of the ocean. An astronaut could suffer the bends. Nitrogen bubbles formed in the blood, clogging capillaries, cutting off precious oxygen to the brain and spinal cord. The consequences could be devastating, paralysis and stroke. Like deep-sea divers, to give their bodies time to adjust to the changing pressures. The night before a space walk, the EVA crew washed out their lungs with a hundred percent oxygen and shut themselves into the air lock for “the camp-out.” For hours they were trapped together in a small chamber already crammed full of equipment. It was not a place for claustrophobics.
   With his arms extended over his head, Luther squirmed into the suit’s hard-shelled upper torso, which was mounted on the air lock wall. It was an exhausting dance, like wriggling into an impossibly small tunnel. At last his head popped out through the hole, and Nicolai helped him close the waist ring, sealing the halves of the suit.
   They put on their helmets. As Nicolai looked down to fit his helmet to the torso assembly, he noticed something glistening on the rim of the suit’s neck ring. Just spittle, he thought, and put on the helmet. They donned their gloves. Sealed into their suits, they opened the equipment lock hatch, floated into the adjoining crew lock, and shut the hatch behind them. They were now in an even smaller compartment, barely large enough to contain both the men and their bulky life-support backpacks.
   Thirty minutes of “prebreathe” came next. While they inhaled pure oxygen, purging their blood of any last nitrogen, Nicolai floated with his eyes closed, mentally preparing for the space ahead. If they could not get the beta gimbal assembly to unlock, they could not reorient the solar panels toward the sun, they be starved for power. Crippled. What Nicolai and Luther accomplished in the next six hours could well determine the fate of the space station.
   Though this responsibility weighed heavily on his tired shoulders, Nicolai was anxious to open the hatch and float out of the lock. To go EVA was like being reborn, the fetus emerging from that small, tight opening, the umbilical restraint dangling as swims out into the vastness of space. Were the situation not so grave, he would be looking forward to it, would be giddily anticipating the freedom of floating in a universe without walls, dazzling blue earth spinning beneath him.
   But the images that came to mind, as he waited with his eyes closed for the thirty minutes to pass, were not of spacewalking. What he saw instead were the faces of the dead. He imagined Discovery as she plunged from the sky. He saw the crew, strapped into their seats, bodies shaken like dolls, spines snapping, hearts exploding. Though Mission Control had not told them the details of the catastrophe, the nightmarish visions filled his head, made his heart pound, his mouth turn dry.
   “Your thirty minutes are up, guys,” came Emma’s voice over the intercom.
   “Time for depress.” Hands clammy with sweat, Nicolai opened his eyes and saw Luther start the depressurization pump. The air was being sucked out, the pressure in the crew lock slowly dropping. If there was a leak in their suits, they would now detect it.
   “A-OK?” asked Luther, checking the latches on their umbilical tethers.
   “I am ready.” Luther vented the crew lock atmosphere to space. Then he released the handle and pulled open the hatch.
   The last air hissed out.
   They paused for a moment, clutching the side of the hatch, staring out in awe. Then Nicolai swam out, into the blackness of space.
   “They’re coming out now,” said Emma, watching on closed-circuit TV as the two men emerged from the crew lock, umbilical tethers trailing after them. They removed tools from the storage box outside the airlock. Then, pulling themselves from handhold to handhold, they made their way toward the main truss. As they passed by the camera mounted just under the truss, Luther gave a wave.
   “You watching the show?” came his voice over the UHF audio system.
   “We see you fine on external camera,” said Griggs. “But your EMU cameras aren’t feeding in.”
   “Nicolai’s too?”
   “Neither one. We’ll try to track down the problem.”
   “Okay, well, we’re heading up onto the truss to check out the damage.” The two men moved out of the first camera’s range. For a moment they disappeared from view. Then Griggs said, “There they are,” and pointed to a new screen, where the space-suited were moving toward the second camer’s propelling themselves hand over hand along the top of the truss.
   Again they passed out range. They were now in the blind zone of the damaged camera and could no longer be seen.
   “Getting close, guys?” asked Emma.
   “Almost—almost there,” said Luther, sounding short of breath.
   Slow down, she thought. Pace yourselves.
   For what seemed like an endless wait, there was only silence from the EVA crew. Emma felt her pulse quicken, her anxiety rising. The station was already crippled and starved for power.
   Nothing must go wrong with these repairs. If only Jack was here, she thought. Jack was a talented tinkerer who could rebuild any boat engine or cobble together a shortwave radio from junkyard scraps. In orbit, the most valuable tools are a clever pair of hands.
   “Luther?” said Griggs.
   There was no answer.
   “Nicolai? Luther? Please respond.”
   “Shit,” said Luther’s voice.
   “What is it? What do you see?” said Griggs.
   “I’m looking at the problem right now, and man, it’s a mess. The whole P-6 end of the main truss is twisted around. Discovery must’ve clipped the 2-B array and bent that end right up. Then she swung over and snapped off the S-band antennas.”
   “What do you think? Can you fix anything?”
   “The S-band’s no problem. We got an ORU for the antennas, and we’ll just replace ‘em. But the port-side solar arrays—forget it. We need a whole new truss on that end.”
   “Okay.” Wearily Griggs rubbed his face. “Okay, so we’re definitely down one PVM. I guess we can deal with that. But we must reorient the P-4 arrays, or we’re screwed.” There was a pause as Luther and Nicolai headed back along the main truss. Suddenly they were in camera range, Emma saw them moving slowly past in their bulky suits and enormous backpacks, like deep-sea divers moving through water. They stopped at the P-4 arrays. One of the men floated down the side of the truss and at the mechanism joining the enormous solar wings to the truss backbone.
   “The gimbal assembly is bent,” said Nicolai. “It cannot turn.”
   “Can you free it up?” asked Griggs.
   They heard a rapid exchange of dialogue between Luther and Nicolai. Then Luther said, “How elegant do you want this repair be?”
   “Whatever it takes. We need the juice soon, or we’re in trouble, guys.”
   “I guess we can try the body shop approach.” Emma looked at Griggs.
   “Does that mean what I think it means?”
   It was Luther who answered the question. “We’re gonna get out a hammer and bang this sucker back into shape.” He was still alive.

   Dr. Isaac Roman gazed through the viewing window at his unfortunate colleague, who was sitting in a hospital bed watching TV. Cartoons, believe it or not. The Nickelodeon channel, which the patient stared at with almost desperate concentration. He didn’t even glance at the space-suited nurse who’d come into the room to remove the untouched lunch tray.
   Roman pressed the intercom button. “How are you feeling today, Nathan?”
   Dr. Nathan Helsinger turned his startled gaze to the viewing window, and for the first time noticed that Roman was standing on the other side of the glass. “I’m fine. I’m perfectly healthy.”
   “You have no symptoms whatsoever?”
   “I told you, I’m fine.” Roman studied him for a moment. The man looked healthy enough, but his face was pale and tense. Scared.
   “When can I come out of isolation?” said Helsinger.
   “It’s been scarcely thirty hours.”
   “The astronauts had symptoms by eighteen hours.”
   “That was in microgravity. We don’t know what to expect here, and we can’t take chances. You know that.”
   Abruptly Helsinger turned to stare at the TV again, but not before Roman saw the flash of tears in his eyes. “It’s my daughter’s birthday today.”
   “We sent a gift in your name. Your wife was informed you couldn’t make it. That you’re on a plane to Kenya.” Helsinger gave a bitter laugh.
   “You do tie up those loose ends well, don’t you? And what if I die? What will you tell her?”
   “That it happened in Kenya.”
   “As good a place as any, I suppose.” He sighed. “So what did you get her?”
   “Your daughter? I believe it was a Dr. Barbie.”
   “That’s exactly what she wanted. How did you know?”
   Roman’s cell phone rang. “I’ll check back on you later,” he said, then turned from the window to answer the phone.
   “Dr. Roman, this is Carlos. We’ve got some of the DNA results. You’d better come up and see this.”
   “I’m on my way.”
   He found Dr. Carlos Mixtal sitting in front of the lab computer.
   Data was scrolling down the monitor in a continuous stream, CTGT … The data was made up of only four letters, G, T, A, and C. It was a nucleotide sequence, and each of the letters represented the building blocks that make up DNA, the genetic blueprint for all living organisms.
   Carlos turned at the sound of Roman’s footsteps, and the expression on his face was unmistakable. Carlos looked scared Just like Helsinger, Roman thought. Every one is scared.
   Roman sat down beside him. “Is that it?” he asked, pointing at the screen.
   “This is from the organism infecting Kenichi Hirai. We took it from the remains that we were able to … scrape from the Discovery.” Remains was the appropriate word for what was left of Hirai’s body. Ragged clumps of tissue, splattered throughout the walls of the orbiter. “Most of the DNA remains unidentifiable. We have no idea what it codes for. But this particular sequence, here on the screen, we can identify. It’s the gene for coenzyme F420.”
   “Which is?”
   “An enzyme specific to the Archaeon domain.”
   Roman sat back, feeling faintly nauseated. “So it’s confirmed,” he murmured.
   “Yes. The organism definitely has Archaeon DNA.” Carlos paused. “I’m afraid there’s bad news.”
   “What do you mean, bad news’? Isn’t this bad enough?”
   Carlos tapped on the keyboard and the nucleotide sequence scrolled to a different segment. “This is another gene cluster we found. I thought at first it had to be a mistake, but I’ve since confirmed it. It’s a match with Rana pipiens. The northern frog.”
   “What?”
   “That’s right. Lord knows how it picked up frog genes. Now here’s where it gets really scary.” Carlos scrolled to yet another segment of the genome. “Another identifiable cluster,” he said.
   Roman felt a chill creeping up his spine. “And what are these genes?”
   “This DNA is specific to Mus musculis. The common mouse.”
   Roman stared at him. “That’s impossible.”
   “I’ve confirmed it. This life-form has somehow incorporated mammalian DNA into its genome. It’s added new enzymatic capabilities. It’s changing. Evolving.”
   Into what? Roman wondered.
   “There’s more.” Again Carlos tapped on the keyboard, and a new sequence of nucleotide bases scrolled onto the monitor. “This cluster is not of Archaeon origin, either.”
   “What is this? More mouse DNA?”
   “No. This part is human.” The chill shot all the way up Roman’s spine.
   The hairs on the back of his neck were bristling. Numbly he reached for the telephone.
   “Connect me to the White House,” he said. “I need to speak to Jared Profitt.”
   His call was answered on the second ring. “This is Profitt.”
   “We’ve analyzed the DNA,” said Roman.
   “And?”
   “The situation is worse than we thought.”

   Nicolai paused to rest, his arms trembling from fatigue. After months of living in space, his body had grown weak and unaccustomed to physical labor. In microgravity there is no heavy and little need to exert one’s muscles. In the last five hours, and Luther had worked nonstop, had repaired the S-band antennas, had dismantled and reassembled the gimbal.
   Now he was exhausted. Just the extra effort of bending his arms in the turgid EVA suit made simple tasks difficult.
   Working in the suit was an ordeal in itself. To insulate the human body from extreme temperatures ranging from -250 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit and to maintain pressure against the vacuum of space, the suit was constructed of multiple layers of aluminized Mylar insulation, nylon ripstop, an Ortho-fabric cover, and a pressure-garment bladder. Beneath the suit, an astronaut wore an undergarment laced with water-cooling tubes. He also had to wear a life-support backpack containing water, oxygen, self-rescue jet pack, and radio equipment. In essence, the EVA suit was a personal spacecraft, bulky and difficult to maneuver in, and just the act of tightening a screw required strength and concentration.
   The work had exhausted Nicolai. His hands were cramping in the clumsy space suit gloves, and he was sweating.
   He was also hungry.
   He took a sip of water from the mouthpiece mounted inside his suit and released a heavy sigh. Though the water tasted strange, almost fishy, he thought nothing of it. Everything tasted strange microgravity. He took another sip and felt wetness splash onto his jaw. He could not reach into his helmet to brush it away, so he ignored it and gazed down at the earth. That sudden glimpse of it, spread out in breathtaking glory beneath him, made him feel a little dizzy, a little nauseated. He closed his eyes, waiting for the feeling to pass. It was motion sickness, nothing more, it often happened when you unexpectedly caught sight of earth. As his stomach settled, he became aware of a new sensation. The spilled water was now trickling up his cheek. He twitched his face, to shake off the droplet, but it continued to slide across his skin.
   But I am in microgravity, where there is no up or down. Water should not be trickling at all.
   He began to shake his head, tapped his gloved hand on his helmet.
   Still he felt the droplet moving up his face, tracing a wet line over his jaw. Toward his ear. It had reached the edge of his comm.-assembly cap now. Surely the fabric would soak up the moisture, would prevent it from trickling further … All at once his body went rigid. The wetness had slid beneath the edge of the cap. It was now squirming toward his ear.
   Not a droplet of water, not a stray trickle, but something that moved purpose. Something alive.
   He thrashed left, then right, trying to dislodge it. He banged hard on his helmet. And still he felt it moving, sliding under comm assembly.
   He caught dizzying glimpses of earth, then black space, then earth again, as he flailed and twisted around in a frantic dance.
   The wetness slithered into his ear.
   “Nicolai? Nicolai, please respond!” said Emma, watching him on the TV monitor. He was turning around and around, gloved hands battering frantically at his helmet. “Luther, he looks like he’s having a seizure!” Luther appeared on camera, moving quickly to assist his EVA partner. Nicolai kept thrashing, shaking his head back and forth.
   Emma could hear them on UHF, Luther asking frantically, “What is it, what is it?”
   “My ear—It is in my ear—”
   “Pain? Does your ear hurt? Look at me!”
   Nicolai slapped his helmet again. “It’s going deeper!” he screamed. “Get it out! Get it out!”
   “What’s wrong with him?” cried Emma.
   “I don’t know! Jesus, he’s panicking—”
   “He’s getting too close to the tool stanchion. Get him away before he damages his suit!” On the TV monitor, Luther grabbed his partner by the arm.
   “Come on, Nicolai! We’re going back in the air lock.” Suddenly Nicolai clutched at his helmet, as though to rip it off.
   “No! Don’t!” screamed Luther, clutching at both of his partner’s arms in a desperate attempt to restrain him. The men thrashed together, umbilical tethers winding, tangling around them.
   Griggs and Diana had joined Emma at the TV monitor, and the three of them watched in horror as the drama unfolded outside the station.
   “Luther, the tool stanchion!” said Griggs. “Watch your suits!” Even as he said it, Nicolai suddenly and violently twisted in Luther’s grasp.
   His helmet slammed into the tool stanchion. A stream of what looked like white mist suddenly spurted out of his faceplate.
   “Luther!” cried Emma. “Check his helmet! Check his helmet!”
   Luther stared at Nicolai’s faceplate. “Shit, he’s got a crack!” yelled. “I can see air leaking out! He’s decompressing!”
   “Tap his emergency 2 and get him in now!” Luther reached over and flipped the emergency oxygen supply switch on Nicolai’s suit. The extra airflow might keep the suit inflated long enough for Nicolai to make it back alive. Still struggling to keep his partner under control, Luther began to haul toward the air lock.
   “Hurry,” murmured Griggs. “Jesus, hurry.” It took precious minutes for Luther to drag his partner into the crew lock, for the hatch to be closed and the atmosphere repressurized. They didn’t wait for the usual air-lock integrity check, pumped the pressure straight up to one atmosphere.
   The hatch swung open, and Emma dove through into the equipment lock.
   Luther had already removed Nicolai’s helmet and was frantically trying to pull him out of the upper torso shell. Working together, they wriggled a struggling Nicolai out of the rest of EVA suit. Emma and Griggs dragged him through the station and into the RSM, where there was full power and light. He was screaming all the way, clawing at the left side of his comm-assembly cap.
   Both eyes were swollen shut, the lids ballooned out. She touched cheeks and felt crepitus—air trapped in the subcutaneous tissues from the decompression. A line of spittle glistened on his jaw.
   “Nicolai, calm down!” said Emma. “You’re all right, do you hear me? You’ll be all right!” He shrieked and yanked off the comm cap. It went flying away.
   “Help me get him onto the board!” said Emma.
   It took all hands to set up the medical restraint board, strip off Nicolai’s ventilation long johns, and strap him down. They had fully restrained now. Even as Emma checked his heart and lungs and examined his abdomen, he continued to whimper and rock his head from side to side.
   “It’s his ear,” said Luther. He had shed his bulky EVA suit and was staring wide-eyed at the tormented Nicolai. “He said there was something in his ear.”
   Emma looked closer at Nicolai’s face. At the line of spittle that traced from his chin, up the curve of his left jaw. To his ear.
   She turned on the battery-powered otoscope and inserted the earpiece into Nicolai’s canal.
   The first thing she saw was blood. A bright drop of it, glistening in the otoscope’s light. Then she focused on the eardrum.
   It was perforated. Instead of the gleam of the tympanic membrane, she saw a black and gaping hole. Barotrauma was her first thought. Had the sudden decompression blown out his eardrum?
   She checked the other eardrum, but it was intact.
   “I’m puzzled,” she turned off the otoscope and looked at Luther.
   “What happened out there?”
   “I don’t know. We were both taking a breather. Resting up before we brought the tools back in. One minute he’s fine, the minute he’s panicking.”
   “I need to look at his helmet.” She left the RSM and headed back to the equipment lock. She swung open the hatch and gazed in, at the two EVA suits, which Luther had remounted on the wall.
   “What are you doing, Watson?” said Griggs, who’d followed her.
   “I want to see how big the crack was. How fast he was decompressing.” She went to the smaller EVA suit, labeled “Rudenko,” and removed the helmet. Peering inside, she saw a dab of moisture adhering to the cracked faceplate. She took out a cotton swab from one of her patch pockets and touched the tip to the fluid. It was thick and gelatinous.
   Blue-green.
   A chill slithered up her spine.
   Kenichi was in here, she suddenly remembered. The night he died, we found him in this air lock. He has somehow contaminated it.
   At once she was backing out in panic, colliding with Griggs in the hatchway. “Out!” she cried. “Get out now!”
   “What is it?”
   “I think we’ve got a biohazard! Close the hatch! Close it!” They both scrambled out of the air lock, into the node.
   Together they slammed the hatch shut and sealed it tight. They exchanged tense glances.
   “You think anything leaked out?” Griggs said.
   Emma scanned the node, searching for any droplets spinning through the air. At first glance she saw nothing. Then a flash of movement, a telltale sparkle, seemed to dance at the furthest periphery of her vision.
   She turned to stare at it. And it was gone.

   Jack sat at the surgeon’s console in Special Vehicle Operations, tension growing with every passing minute as he watched the clock on the front screen. The voices coming over his headset were speaking with new urgency, the chatter fast and staccato, as reports flew back and forth between the controllers and ISS flight director Woody Ellis. Similar in layout to the shuttle Flight Room and housed in the same building, the SVO room was a smaller, more specialized version, manned by a team dedicated only to space station operations. Over the last thirty-six hours, since Discovery had collided with ISS, this room had been the scene of relentlessly mounting anxiety, laced with intermittent panic.
   With so many people in the room, so many hours of unrelieved stress, the air itself smelled of crisis, the mingled sweat and stale coffee.
   Nicolai Rudenko was suffering from decompression injuries and clearly needed to be evacuated. Because there was only one lifeboat—the Crew Return Vehicle—the entire crew was coming home. This would be a controlled evacuation. No shortcuts, no mistakes. No panic. NASA had run through this simulation many times before, but a CRV evac had never actually been done, not with five living, breathing human beings aboard.
   Not with someone I love aboard.
   Jack was sweating, almost sick with dread.
   He kept glancing at the clock, cross-checking it with his watch.
   They had waited for ISS’s orbital path to reach the right position before vehicle separation could proceed. The goal was to bring the CRV down in the most direct approach possible to a landing site immediately accessible to medical personnel. The entire crew would need assistance.
   After weeks of living in space, they would be weak as kittens, their muscles unable to support them.
   The time for separation was approaching. It would take them twenty-five minutes to coast away from ISS and acquire GPS guidance, fifteen minutes for the deorbit burn setup. An hour to land.
   In less than two hours, Emma would be back on earth. One way or another.
   The thought came before he could suppress it.
   Before he could stop himself from remembering the terrible sight of Jill Hewitt’s flayed body on the autopsy table.
   He clenched his hands into fists, forcing himself to concentrate on Nicolai Rudenko’s biotelemetry readings. The heart rate was fast but regular, blood pressure holding steady. Come on, come on.
   Let’s bring them home now.
   He heard Griggs, on board ISS, report, “Capcom, my crew is all aboard the CRV and the hatch is closed. It’s a little cozy in here, we’re ready when you are.”
   “Stand by to power up,” said Capcom.
   “Standing by.”
   “How is the patient doing?” Jack’s heart gave a leap as he heard Emma’s voice join the loop.
   “His vitals remain stable, but he’s disoriented times three. The crepitus has migrated to his neck and upper torso, and it’s given him some discomfort. I’ve given him another dose of morphine.” The sudden decompression had caused air bubbles to form in his soft tissues. The condition was harmless, but painful. What Emma worried about were air bubbles in the nervous system. Could that be the reason Nicolai was confused?
   Woody Ellis said, “Go for power up. Remove ECCLES seals.”
   “ISS,” said Capcom, “you are now go for—”
   “Belay that!” a voice cut in.
   Jack looked at Flight Director Ellis in confusion. Ellis looked just as confused. He turned to face JSC director Ken Blankenship, who’d just walked into the room, accompanied by a dark-haired man in a suit and a half dozen Air Force officers.
   “I’m sorry, Woody,” said Blankenship. “Believe me, this is not my decision.”
   “What decision?” said Ellis.
   “The evacuation is off.”
   “We have a sick man up there! The CRV’s ready to go—”
   “He can’t come home.”
   “Whose decision is that?”
   The dark-haired man stepped forward. He said, with what was almost a quiet note of apology, “The decision is mine. I’m Jared Profitt, White House Security Council. Please tell your crew to reopen the hatches and exit the CRV.”
   “My crew is in trouble,” said Ellis. “I’m bringing them home.”
   Trajectory cut in, “Flight, we have to go to sep now if we want them landing on target.”
   Ellis nodded to Capcom. “Proceed to CRV power up. Let’s go to sep.” Before Capcom could utter another word, his headset was yanked off and he was hauled from his chair and pushed aside. An Air Force officer took Capcom’s place at the console.
   “Hey!” yelled Ellis. “Hey!” All the flight controllers froze as the other Air Force officers immediately fanned out across the room. Not a weapon was drawn, but the threat was apparent.
   “ISS, do not power up,” said the new Capcom. “The evacuation has been canceled. Reopen the hatches and exit the CRV.”
   A baffled Griggs responded, “I don’t think I copied that, Houston.”
   “The evacuation is off. Exit the CRV. We are experiencing difficulties with both TOPO and GNC computers. Flight has decided it’s best to hold off the evac.”
   “How long?”
   “Indefinitely.” Jack shot to his feet, ready to wrestle away Capcom’s headset.
   Jared Profitt suddenly stepped in front of him, barring his way.
   “You don’t understand the situation, sir.”
   “My wife is on that station. We’re bringing her home.”
   “They can’t come home. They may all be infected.”
   “With what?” Profitt didn’t answer.
   In fury, Jack lunged toward him, but was hauled back by two Air Force officers.
   “Infected with what?” Jack yelled.
   “A new organism,” said Profitt. “A chimera.”
   Jack looked at Blankenship’s stricken face. He looked at the Air Force officers who now stood poised to assume control of the consoles. Then he noticed another familiar face, that of Leroy Cornell, who’d just come into the room.
   Cornell looked pale and shaken.
   That’s when Jack understood that this decision had been made at the very top. That nothing he, or Blankenship, or Woody Ellis would make a difference.
   NASA was no longer in control.

The Chimera

August 13

   They gathered at Jack’s house, where all the shades were drawn.
   They didn’t dare meet at JSC, where they would most certainly be noticed. They were all so stunned by the sudden takeover of NASA operations they had no idea how to proceed. This was one crisis which they had no operations manual, no contingency plans. Jack had invited only a handful of people, all of them from inside NASA operations, Todd Cutler, Gordon Obie, Flight Directors Woody Ellis and Randy Carpenter, and Liz Gianni from the Payload Directorate.
   The doorbell rang, and everyone tensed.
   “He’s here,” said Jack, and he opened the door.
   Dr. Eli Petrovitch from NASA’s Life Sciences Directorate stepped in, clutching a laptop carrying case. He was a thin and fragile man who, for the past two years, had been battling Lymphoma. Clearly he was losing the war. Most of his hair had fallen out, and only a few brittle white strands remained. His skin like yellowed parchment, stretched over the jutting bones of his face. But there was the glow of excitement in his eyes, lit by a scientist’s unflagging curiosity.
   “Did we get it?” asked Jack.
   Petrovitch nodded and patted his briefoase. On that skeletal face, his smile looked ghoulish. “USAMRIID has agreed to share some of its data.”
   “Some?”
   “Not all. Much of the genome remains classified. We were given only parts of the sequence, with large gaps. They’re given us just enough to prove that the situation is grave.” He carried a laptop to the dining room table and flipped it open. As everyone crowded around to watch, Petrovitch booted up the computer, then slipped in a floppy disk.
   Data began to scroll down, line after line of seemingly random letters marching at a dizzying pace down the screen. It was not text, these letters did not spell out words at all, but a code. The four letters reappeared again and again, in a changing sequence, A, T, G, and C. They represented the nucleotides adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. The building blocks that made up DNA. string of letters was a genome, the chemical blueprint for a organism.
   “This,” said Petrovitch, “is their chimera. The organism that killed Kenichi Hirai.”
   “What is this ky-mir-ra’ thing I keep hearing about?” asked Randy Carpenter. “For the sake of us ignorant engineers, maybe you could explain it?”
   “Certainly,” said Petrovitch. “And there’s no reason to feel ignorant. It’s not a term used much outside of molecular biology. The word comes from the ancient Greeks. Chimera was a mythological beast, said to be unconquerable. A fire-breathing creature with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. She was eventually slain by a hero named Bellerophon. It wasn’t exactly a fight, because he cheated. He hitched a ride on Pegasus, the horse, and shot arrows down at Chimera from above.”
   “This mythology is interesting,” cut in Carpenter impatiently, “but what’s the relevance?”
   “The Greek Chimera was a bizarre creature made up of three different animals. Lion, goat, and serpent, all combined into one. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing here, in this chromosome. A creature as bizarre as the beast killed by Bellerophon. This is a biological chimera whose DNA comes from at least three unrelated species.”
   “Can you identify those species?” asked Carpenter.
   Petrovitch nodded. “Over the years, scientists around the world have amassed a library of gene sequences from a variety of species, from viruses to elephants. But collecting this data is slow and tedious. It’s taken decades just to analyze the human genome. So you can imagine, there are a number of species that haven’t been sequenced. Large areas of this chimera’s genome can’t be identified, they’re nowhere in the library. But here’s what we have been able to identify so far.” He clicked on the icon for “species matches.” On the screen appeared, Mus musculis common mouse), Rana pipiens (northern leopard frog), Homo sapiens.
   “This organism is part mouse, part amphibian. And part human.” He paused. “In a sense,” he said, “the enemy is us.” The room fell silent.
   “Which of our genes is on that chromosome?” Jack asked softly. “What part of Chimera is human?”
   “An interesting question,” said Petrovitch, nodding in approval.
   “It deserves an interesting answer. You and Dr. Cutler will appreciate the significance of this list.” He typed on the keyboard.
   On the screen appeared, Phospholipase A.
   “My God,” murmured Todd Cutler. “These are all digestive enzymes.” The organism is primed to devour its host, thought Jack. It uses these enzymes to digest us from the inside, reducing our muscles and organs and connective tissue to little more than a foul soup.
   “Jill Hewitt—she told us Hirai’s body had disintegrated,” said Randy Carpenter. “I thought she was hallucinating.”
   Jack said suddenly, “This has got to be a bioengineered organism! Someone cooked this thing up in a lab. Took a bacteria or virus and grafted on genes from other species, to make it a more effective killing machine.”
   “But which bacteria? Which virus?” said Petrovitch. “That’s the mystery here. Without more of the genome to examine, we can’t identify which species they started off with. USAMRIID refuses to show us the most important part of this organism’s chromosome. The part that identifies this killer.” He looked at Jack.
   “You’re the only one here who’s actually seen the pathology at autopsy.”
   “It was only a glimpse. They pushed me out of the room so fast I barely got a look. What I saw appeared to be some sort of cysts. The size of pearls, embedded in a blue-green matrix. They were in Mercer’s thorax and abdomen. In Hewitt’s cranium. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
   “Could they have been hydatid cysts?” asked Petrovitch.
   “What’s that?” asked Woody.
   “It’s an infection by the larval stage of a parasitic tapeworm called echinococcus. It causes cysts in the liver and lungs. For matter, in any organ.”
   “You think this could be a parasite?”
   Jack shook his head. “Hydatid cysts take a long time to grow. Years, not days. I don’t think this was a parasite.”
   “Maybe they weren’t cysts at all,” said Todd. “Maybe they were spores. Fungus balls. Aspergillus or cryptococcus.”
   Liz Gianni from Payloads cut in, “The crew reported a problem with fungal contamination. One of the experiments had to be destroyed because of overgrowth.”
   “Which experiment?” asked Todd.
   “I’d have to look it up. I remember it was one of the cell cultures.”
   “But simple fungal contamination wouldn’t account for these deaths,” said Petrovitch. “Remember, there were fungi floating around Mir all the time, and no one died of it.” He looked at the computer screen. “This genome tells us we’re dealing with a new life-form. I agree with Jack. It must have been engineered.”
   “So it’s bioterrorism,” said Woody Ellis. “Someone’s sabotaged our station. They must have sent it up in one of the payloads.” Liz Gianni vigorously shook her head. Aggressive and intense, she was a forceful presence at any meeting, and she spoke up now with absolute assurance.
   “Every payload goes through safety review. There are hazard reports, three-phase analyses of all containment devices. Believe me, we would have nixed anything dangerous.”
   “Assuming you knew it was dangerous,” said Ellis.
   “Of course we’d know!”
   “What if there was a breach in security?” said Jack. “Many of the experimental payloads arrive directly from the principal investigators—the scientists themselves. We don’t know what their security is like. We don’t know if they have a terrorist working lab. If they switched a bacterial culture at the last minute, we necessarily wouldn’t know?”
   For the first time Liz looked uncertain. “It … it’s unlikely.”
   “But it could happen.” Though she wouldn’t admit the possibility, dismay registered in her eyes. “We’ll grill every principal investigator,” she said.
   “Every scientist who sent up an experiment. If they had a lapse in security, I’m fucking well gonna find out about it.”
   She probably will, thought Jack. Like the other men in the room, he was a little afraid of Liz Gianni.
   “There’s one question we haven’t asked yet,” said Gordon Obie, speaking up for the first time. As always, he’d been the Sphinx, listening without comment, silently processing information. “The question is why? Why would anyone sabotage the station? Is this someone with a grudge against us? A fanatic to technology?”
   “The biological equivalent of the Unabomber,” said Todd Cutler.
   “Then why not just release the organism at JSC and kill off our infrastructure? That would be easier, and far more logical.”
   “You can’t apply logic to a fanatic,” Cutler pointed out.
   “You can apply logic to everyone, including fanatics,” Gordon responded.
   “As long as you know the framework in which they operate. And that’s why this bothers me. That’s why I wonder if we’re really dealing with sabotage.”
   “What else would it be,” said Jack, “if not sabotage?”
   “There is another possibility. It could be something just as frightening,” said Gordon, his troubled gaze lifting to Jack’s. “A mistake.”

   Dr. Isaac Roman ran down the hall, his pager alarm squealing on his belt, dreading what he was about to face. He silenced the beeper and opened the door leading into the Level 4 isolation suite. He did not enter the patient’s room, but stood safely outside and stared the horror unfolding beyond the observation window.
   There was blood splattered on the walls and pooling on the floor where Dr. Nathan Helsinger lay seizing. Two nurses and a physician in space suits were trying to stop him from injuring himself, but his spasms were so violent and so powerful they could not restrain him. His leg shot out and a nurse went sprawling, across the blood-slicked concrete floor.
   Roman hit the intercom button. “Your suit! Is there a breach?” As she slowly rose to her feet, he could see her expression of terror. She looked down at her gloves, her sleeves, then at the juncture where the hose fed air into her suit. “No,” she said, and it was almost a sob of relief. “No breach.”
   Blood splattered the window. Roman jerked back as bright droplets trickled down the glass. Helsinger was banging his head against the floor now, his spine relaxing, then hyperextending.
   Opisthotonos. Roman had seen this bizarre posture only once before, in a victim of strychnine poisoning, the body curved backward like a bow strung under tension. Helsinger spasmed again, and his skull slammed backward against the concrete. Blood sprayed the faceplates of the two nurses.
   “Back off!” Roman commanded through the intercom.
   “He’s hurting himself!” said the physician.
   “I don’t want anyone else exposed.”
   “If we could get these seizures under control—”
   “There’s nothing you can do to save him. I want you all to move away now. Before you get hurt.” Reluctantly the two nurses backed away. After a pause, so did the physician. They stood in silent helplessness as the scene of horror played out at their feet.
   New convulsions sent Helsinger’s head whipping backward.
   The scalp split open, like cloth ripping along a seam. The pool blood widened into a lake.
   “Oh, God, look at his eyes!” one of the nurses cried.
   The eyes were popping out, like two giant marbles straining to burst out of the sockets. Traumatic proptosis, thought Roman.
   Helsinger’s eyeballs thrust forward by catastrophic intracranial pressure, the lids shoved apart, wide and staring.
   The seizures continued, unrelenting, the head battering the floor.
   Splinters of bone flew up and ticked against the window.
   It was as though he were trying to crack open his own skull, to free whatever was trapped inside.
   Another crack. Another spattering of blood and bone.
   He should have been dead. Why was he still seizing?
   But even decapitated chickens continue to twitch and thrash, and Helsinger’s death throes were not yet over. His head lifted the floor, his spine curling forward like a spring winding up to unbearable tension just before it snaps. His neck lashed backward.
   There was a crack, and the skull split open like an egg. Shards of bone flew everywhere. A lump of gray matter splashed the window.
   Roman gasped and stumbled backward, nausea rising in his throat. He dropped his head, fighting to stay in control. He struggled against the darkness that threatened to envelop his vision.
   Sweating, shaking, he managed to lift his head. To look, once again, through the window.
   Nathan Helsinger at last lay still. What was left of his head rested in a lake of blood. There was so much blood that for a moment Roman could not focus on anything else but that spreading pool of scarlet. Then his gaze settled on the dead man’s face. On a blue-green mass that clung, quivering, to his forehead. Cysts.
   Chimera.

August 14

   “Nicolai? Nicolai, please respond!”
   “My ear—It is in my ear—”
   “Pain? Does your ear hurt? Look at me!”
   “It’s going deeper! Get it out! Get it now!”
   White House Security Council science adviser Jared Profitt pressed the OFF button on the cassette recorder and looked at the men and women seated around the table. All of them wore expressions of horror. “What happened to Nicolai Rudenko was more than just a decompressive accident,” he said. “That’s why we took the action we did. That’s why I urge you all to stay the course. There’s too much at stake. Until we learn more about this organism—how it reproduces, how it infects—we can’t let those astronauts come home.”
   The response was stunned silence. Even NASA administrator Leroy Cornell, who had led off the meeting with an outraged about the takeover of his agency, sat utterly speechless.
   It was the president who asked the first question. “What do we know about this organism?”
   “Dr. Isaac Roman from USAMRIID can answer that better than I can,” said Profitt, and he nodded to Roman, who was not seated the table, but on the periphery, where he’d been largely by everyone in the room. Now he stood so that he could be seen, tall and graying man with the look of exhaustion in his eyes.
   “I’m afraid the news is not good,” he said. “We’ve injected Chimera into a number of different mammalian species including dogs and spider monkeys. Within ninety-six hours, all were dead. mortality rate of one hundred percent.”
   “And there’s no treatment? Nothing has worked?” asked the secretary of defense.
   “Nothing. Which is frightening enough. But there’s worse news.” The room went very still as fear rippled across faces. How could this get any worse?
   “We have repeated the DNA analysis of the most recent generation of eggs, collected from the dead monkeys. Chimera has acquired yet a new cluster of genes, specific to Ateles geoffroyi, spider monkey.
   The president blanched. He looked at Profitt. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
   “It’s devastating,” said Profitt. “Every time this life-form goes through a new host, every time it produces a new generation, it seems to acquire new DNA. It has the ability to stay several steps ahead of us by picking up new genes, new capabilities it’s never had before.”
   “How the hell can it do this?” asked General Moray of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “An organism that picks up new genes? That keeps remaking itself? It sounds impossible.”
   Roman said, “It’s not impossible, sir. In fact, a similar occurs in nature. Bacteria often share genes with each other, trading them back and forth by using viruses as couriers. That’s they develop antibiotic resistance so quickly. They spread around the genes for resistance, adding new DNA to their chromosomes. Like everything else in nature, they’ll use every weapon they have to survive. To perpetuate their species. That’s what this is doing.” He moved to the head of the table, where a blowup of an electron micrograph was displayed. “You can see here, in this photograph of the cell, what looks like tiny granules. They’re clumps of helper virus.
   Couriers that travel into the host cell, its DNA, and bring back bits and pieces of genetic material to Chimera. Adding new genes, new weapons to its arsenal.” Roman looked at the president. “This organism came equipped to survive any environmental conditions. All it needs to do is raid the local fauna’s DNA.”
   The president looked ill. “So it’s still changing. Still evolving.” There were murmurs of dismay around the table. Frightened glances, creaking chairs.
   “What about that doctor who got infected?” asked a woman from the Pentagon. “The one USAMRIID had in Level Four isolation? Is he still alive?”
   Roman paused, a look of pain in his eyes. “Dr. Helsinger died late last night. I witnessed the terminal event and it was a horrible death. He began to convulse so violently we didn’t dare control him for fear someone’s space suit would be torn and someone else exposed. These were seizures unlike any I’ve ever seen. It was though every single neuron in his brain fired at once in a electrical storm. He broke the bed rail. Snapped it cleanly off the frame. Rolled off the mattress and began to—to batter his head on the floor. So hard, we could…” He swallowed.
   “We could see the skull crack. By then there was blood flying everywhere. He was smashing his head against the floor, almost as if he was trying to break it open. To release the pressure building up inside. The trauma only made it worse, because he began to bleed into his brain. At the end, the intracranial pressure was so great, it pushed his eyes out of their sockets. Like a cartoon character. Like an animal you see squashed on the road.” He took a deep breath. “That, he said quietly, “was the terminal event.”
   “Now you understand the possible epidemic we face,” said Profitt. “This is why we can’t afford to be weak or careless. Or sentimental.” There was another long silence. Every one looked at the president.
   They were all waiting for—hoping for—an unequivocal decision.
   Instead, he swiveled his chair toward the window and stared outside. “I wanted to be an astronaut, once,” he said sadly.
   Didn’t we all? thought Profitt. Which child in this country has not dreamed of riding a rocket into space?
   “I was there when they launched John Glenn on the shuttle,” the president said. “And I cried. Just like everyone else. Goddamn it, but I cried like a baby. Because I was proud of him. And proud of this country. And proud of just being part of the human race…”
   He paused. Took a deep breath and wiped his hand across his eyes.
   “How the hell do I condemn those people to death?” Profitt and Roman exchanged unhappy glances.
   “We have no choice, sir,” said Profitt. “It’s five lives versus the lives of God knows how many people here on earth.”
   “They’re heroes. Honest-to-God heroes. And we’re going to leave them up there to die.”
   “The chances are, Mr. President, we wouldn’t be able to save them anyway,” said Roman. “All of them are probably infected. Or they soon will be.”
   “Then some of them may not be infected?”
   “We don’t know. We do know Rudenko definitely is. We believe he was exposed while in his EVA suit. If you’ll recall, Astronaut Hirai was found seizing in the EVA equipment lock ten days ago. That would explain how the suit got contaminated.”
   “Why aren’t the others sick yet? Why only Rudenko?”
   “Our studies indicate this organism needs incubation time before it reaches the infectious stage. We think it’s most around the time the host dies, or afterwards, when it’s released from the corpse. But we’re not certain. We can’t afford to be wrong. We have to assume they’re all carriers.”
   “Then keep them in Level Four isolation until you know. But at least get them home.”
   “Sir, that’s where the risk comes in,” said Profitt. “In just bringing them home. The CRV’s not like the shuttle, which you guide down to a specific landing strip. They’d be coming home in far less controllable vehicle—essentially a pod with parachutes. What if something goes wrong? What if the CRV breaks up in the atmosphere, or crashes on landing? This organism would be into the air. The wind could carry it anywhere! By then, it will so much human DNA in its genome, we won’t be able to fight it. It will be too much like us. Any drug we use against it would kill humans as well.” Profitt paused, letting the impact of his words in. “We can’t let emotions affect our decision. Not with so much at stake.”
   “Mr. President,” cut in Leroy Cornell, “with all due respect, may I point out that this would be a politically disastrous move. The public will not allow five heroes to die in space.”
   “Politics should be our last concern right now!” said Profitt. “Our first priority is public health!”
   “Then why the secrecy? Why have you cut NASA out of the loop? You’ve shown us only parts of the organism’s genome. Our life-sciences people are ready and willing to contribute their expertise. We want to find a cure every bit as much as—even more than-you do. If USAMRIID would just share all its data with us, we could work together.”
   “Our concern is security,” said General Moray. “A hostile country could turn this into a devastating bioweapon. Giving out Chimera’s genetic code is like handing out a blueprint for that weapon.”
   “Meaning you don’t trust NASA with that information?”
   General Moray met Cornell’s gaze head-on. “I’m afraid NASA’s new philosophy of sharing technology with every two-bit country under the sun does not make your agency a good security risk.”
   Cornell flushed with anger but said nothing.
   Profitt looked at the president. “Sir, it is a tragedy that five astronauts must be left up there to die. But we have-to look beyond that, to the possibility of a far great. er tragedy. A worldwide epidemic, caused by an organism we’re just beginning to understand. USAMRIID is working around the clock to learn what makes it tick. Until then, I urge you to stay the course. NASA is not equipped to deal with a biological disaster. They have one planetary-protection officer. One. The Army’s Biological Rapid Response Team is prepared for just this sort of crisis. As for NASA operations, leave that under the control of U.S. Space Command, backed up by the Fourteenth Air Force. NASA has too many personal and emotional ties to the astronauts. We need a firm grip on the helm. We need absolute discipline.”
   Profitt slowly looked around at the men and women seated at the long table. Only a few of these people did he truly respect. Some were interested only in prestige and power. Others had earned a seat here because of political connections. Still others were easily swayed by public sentiment. Few had motives as uncomplicated as his.
   Few had suffered his nightmares, had awakened soaked with sweat in the darkness, shaken by the terrible vision of what they might face.
   “Then you’re saying the astronauts can never come home,” said Cornell.
   Profitt looked at the NASA administrator’s ashen face and felt genuine sympathy. “When we find a way to cure it, when we know we can kill this organism, then we can talk about bringing your people home.”
   “If they’re still alive,” murmured the president.
   Profitt and Roman glanced at each other, but neither responded.
   They already understood the obvious. They would not find a cure in time.
   The astronauts would not be coming home alive.

   Jared Profitt wore his jacket and tie as he walked through that sweltering day, but he scarcely noticed the heat. Others might of the miseries of a D. C. summer. He did not mind the soaring temperatures. It was winter he dreaded, because he was so sensitive to cold, and on frosty days his lips would turn blue and he’d shiver under layers of scarves and sweaters. Even in summer he kept a sweater in his office to combat the effects of the air conditioner.
   Today the temperature was in the nineties, and perspiration gleamed on all the faces he passed on the street, but he did not remove his jacket or loosen his tie.
   The meeting had left him deeply chilled, both in body and soul.
   He was carrying his lunch in a brown paper bag, the identical lunch he packed every morning before he left for work. The route he walked was the one he always took, west toward the Potomac, the Reflecting Pool on his left. He took comfort in the routine, familiar. There were so few things in his life that offered much reassurance these days, and as he grew older, he found himself adhering to certain rituals, much as a monk in a religious order to the daily rhythm of work and prayer and meditation. In many ways, he was like those ancient ascetics, a man who ate only to his body and dressed in suits only because it was required of him.
   A man for whom wealth meant nothing.
   The name Profitt could not be further from the reality of the man.
   He slowed his pace as he walked along the grassy slope past the Vietnam War Memorial, and gazed down at the solemn line of visitors shuffling past the wall etched with names of the dead. He knew what they were all thinking as they confronted those panels of black granite, as they considered the horrors of war, So many names. So many dead.
   And he thought, You have no idea.
   He found an empty bench in the shade and sat down to eat. From his brown bag he removed an apple, a wedge of cheddar, and a bottle of water. Not Evian or Perrier, but straight from the tap. slowly, watching the tourists as they made the circuit from to memorial.
   And so we honor our war heroes, he thought. Society erected statues, engraved marble plaques, raised flags. It at the number of lives lost on both sides in the slaughterhouse of war.
   Two million soldiers and civilians dead in Vietnam. Fifty million dead in World War II. Twenty-one million dead in World War I. The numbers were appalling. People might ask, Could man have a more lethal enemy than himself?
   The answer was yes.
   Though humans could not see it, the enemy was all around them. Inside them. In the air they breathe , the food and water they ate and drank.
   Throughout the history of mankind, it has been their nemesis, and it would survive them long after they have vanished from the face of the earth. The enemy was the microbial world, and over the centuries, it has killed more people than all of man’s wars combined.
   From A.D. 542 to 767, forty million dead of the plague in the Justinian pandemic.
   In the 1300s, twenty-five million dead when the Black Death returned.
   In 1918 and 1919, thirty million dead of influenza.
   And in 1997, Amy Sorensen Profitt, age forty-three, dead of pneumococcal pneumonia.
   He finished his apple, placed the core in the brown bag, and carefully rolled his rubbish into a tight bundle. Though the lunch had been meager, he felt satisfied, and he remained on the bench for a while, sipping the last of the water.
   A tourist walked by, a woman with light brown hair. When she turned just so and the light slanted across her face, she looked like Amy. She felt him staring, and she glanced his way. They eyed each other for a moment, she with wariness, he with silent apology.
   Then she walked away, and he decided she did not look like his dead wife after all. No one did. No one could.
   He rose to his feet, discarded his trash in a receptacle, and began to walk back the way he’d come. Past the wall. Past the uniformed veterans, gray and shaggy now, keeping vigil. Honoring the memory of the dead.
   But even the memories fade, he thought. The image of her smile across the kitchen table, the echo of her laughter—all those were receding as time went by. Only the painful memories hung on. A San Francisco hotel room. A late-night phone call. Frantic images of airports and taxis and phone booths as he raced across the country to reach Bethesda Hospital in time.
   But necrotizing streptococcus has its own agenda, its own timetable for killing. Just like Chimera.
   He drew in a breath of air and wondered how many viruses, how many bacteria, how many fungi, had just swirled into his lungs. And which of those might kill him.

August 15

   “I say fuck’em,” said Luther. The air-to-ground comm was off, conversation unmonitored by Mission Control. “Let’s get back on the CRV, flip the switches, and go. They can’t make us turn and come back.” Once they left the station, they couldn’t turn around. The CRV was essentially a glider with drag chutes. After separation from ISS, it could travel a maximum of four revolutions around the earth before it was forced to deorbit and land.
   “We’ve been advised to sit tight,” said Griggs. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
   “Follow stupid shit orders? Nicolai’s going to die on us if we don’t get him home!”
   Griggs looked at Emma. “Opinion, Watson?” For the last twenty-four hours, Emma had been hovering by her patient, monitoring Nicolai’s condition. They could all see for themselves that he was in critical condition. Tied down to the medical restraint board, he twitched and trembled, his limbs flailing out with such violence Emma was afraid he’d snap his bones. He looked like a boxer who had been pummeled mercilessly in the ring. Subcutaneous emphysema had bloated the soft tissues Of his face, swelling his eyelids shut. Through the narrow slits, sclerae were a brilliant, demonic red.
   She didn’t know how much Nicolai could hear and understand, so she didn’t dare say aloud what she was thinking. She motioned her crewmates out of the Russian service module.
   They met in the hab, where Nicolai could not hear them, and where they could safely remove their goggles and masks.
   “Houston needs to clear our evac now,” she said, “or we’re going to lose him.”
   “They’re aware of the situation,” said Griggs. “They can’t authorize an evac until the White House clears it.”
   “So we’re just gonna hang around up here and watch each other get sick?” said Luther. “What if we just got in the CRV and left? What’re they gonna do, shoot us down?”
   Diana said quietly, “They could.” The truth of what she’d just said made them all fall silent. Every astronaut who had ever climbed aboard the shuttle and sweated through a countdown knew that sitting in a bunker at KSC was a team of Air Force officers whose only job was to blow up the shuttle, incinerating the crew. Should the steering system go awry during launch, should the shuttle veer disastrously toward a crowded area, it was the duty of these range-safety officers to press the destruct buttons. They had met every member of the shuttle’s crew. They had probably seen photographs of the astronauts’ families. They knew exactly who they would be killing. It was a responsibility, yet no one doubted those Air Force officers would carry it out.
   Just as they would almost certainly destroy the CRV if so ordered. When faced with the specter of a new and lethal epidemic, the lives of five astronauts would seem trivial.
   Luther said, “I’m willing to bet they’ll let us land safely. Why wouldn’t they? Four of us are still healthy. We haven’t caught anything.”
   “But we’ve already been exposed,” said Diana. “We’ve breathe the same air, shared the same quarters. Luther, you and Nicolai slept together in that air lock.”
   “I feel perfectly fine.”
   “So do I. So do Griggs and Watson. But if this is an infection, we may already be in the incubation stages.”
   “That’s why we have to follow orders,” said Griggs. “We stay right where we are.” Luther turned to Emma. “Do you go along with this martyr shit?”
   “No,” she said. “I don’t.” Griggs looked at her in surprise. “Watson?”
   “I’m not thinking about myself,” said Emma. “I’m thinking about my patient. Nicolai can’t talk, so I have to do it for him.
   “I want him in a hospital, Griggs.”
   “You heard what Houston said.”
   “What I heard was a lot of confusion. Evac orders being given, then belayed. First they tell us it’s Marburg virus. Then they it’s not a virus at all, but some new organism cooked up by bioterrorists. I don’t know what the hell’s going on down there. All I know is, my patient is…” She abruptly lowered her voice.
   “He’s dying,” she said softly. “My primary responsibility is to keep him alive.”
   “And my responsibility is to act as commander of this station,” said Griggs. “I have to believe that Houston is calling the shots best they can. They wouldn’t put us in this danger unless the situation was truly grave.” Emma could not disagree. Mission Control was manned by people she knew, people she trusted. And Jack is there, she thought. There was no human being she trusted more than him.
   “Looks like we have data being uplinked,” said Diana, glancing at the computer. “It’s for Watson.” Emma glided across the module to read the message glowing on the screen. It was from NASA Life Sciences.


   Dr. Watson,
   We think you should know exactly what you’re dealing with—what we’re all dealing with. This is the DNA analysis of the organism infecting Kenichi Hirai.


   Emma called up the attached file.
   It took her a moment to mentally process the nucleotide sequence that flowed across the screen. A few minutes more to actually believe the conclusions.
   Genes from three different species were on one chromosome.
   Leopard frog. Mouse. And human.
   “What is this organism?” asked Diana.
   Emma said softly, “A new life-form.” It was a Frankenstein’s monster. An abomination of nature. She suddenly focused on the word “mouse,” and she thought, The mice. They were the first to get sick. Over the past week and a they had continued to die. The last time she had checked the cage, only one mouse, a female, was still alive.
   She left the hab and headed deeper into the powered-down half of the station.
   The U.S. Lab was deep in gloom. She floated across the semidarkness to the animal holding rack. Had the mice been the original carriers for this organism, the vessels in which the been brought aboard ISS? Or were they just the accidental victims, infected through exposure to something else aboard the station?
   And was the last mouse alive?
   She opened the rack drawer and peered into the cage at the lone resident.
   Her heart sank. The mouse was dead.
   She had come to think of this female with the chewed-up ear as a fighter, the scrappy survivor who, through sheer orneriness, outlasted its cage mates. Now Emma felt an unexpected pang of grief as she gazed at the lifeless body floating at the far end of cage. Its abdomen already looked bloated. The corpse would have to be removed immediately and discarded with the contaminated trash.
   She interfaced the cage to the glove box, inserted her hands into the gloves, and reached in to grab the mouse. The instant fingers closed over it, the corpse suddenly scrabbled to life. Se gave a scream of surprise and released it.
   The mouse flipped over and glared at her, whiskers twitching in irritation.
   Emma gave a startled laugh. “So you’re not dead after all,” she murmured.
   “Watson!” She turned toward the intercom, which had just spat out her name. “I’m in the lab.”
   “Get in here! The RSM. Nicolai’s seizing!” She flew out of the lab, caroming off walls in the gloom as she shot toward the Russian end. The first thing she saw as she popped into the RSM were the faces of her crewmates, their horror evident even through their goggles. Then they moved aside and she saw Nicolai.
   His left arm was jerking spasmodically and with such power the whole restraint board shuddered. The seizures marched down the left side of his body, and his leg began to thrash as well. Now were lurching, thrusting off the board as the seizures continued inexorable march across his body. The jerking intensified, the restraints scraping his skin bloody. Emma heard a sickening crack the bones of his left forearm snapped. The right wrist restraint apart, and his arm thrashed unchecked, the back of his hand pummeling the edge of the table, smashing bones and flesh.
   “Hold him still! I’m going to pump him full of Valium!” yelled Emma, frantically rummaging inside the medical kit.
   Griggs and Luther each grabbed an arm, but even Luther was not powerful enough to control the unrestrained limb. Nicolai’s right arm flew up like a whip, flinging Luther aside. Luther went tumbling, and his foot clipped Diana on the cheek, knocking her goggles askew.
   Nicolai’s head suddenly slammed backward against the table.
   He gasped in a gurgling breath, and his chest bloated up with air. A cough exploded from his throat.
   Phlegm sprayed out, catching Diana in the face. She gave a yelp of disgust and released her grip, drifting backward as she wiped her exposed eye.
   A globule of blue-green mucus floated past Emma. Encased in that gelatinous mass was a pearllike kernel. Only as it drifted the luminaire assembly of the lighting system did Emma realize what she was looking at. When a hen’s egg is held in front of a candle flame, the contents can be seen through the shell. Now the luminaire assembly was acting as the candle, its glow penetrating the kernel’s opaque membrane.
   Inside, something was moving. Something was alive.
   The cardiac monitor squealed. Emma spun around to look at Nicolai, and she saw that he had stopped breathing. A flat line traced across the monitor.

August 16

   Jack slipped the comm unit on his head. He was alone in a back room of Mission Control, and this conversation was supposed to be confidential, but he knew that what he and Emma said today would not, in fact, be private. He suspected that all communications were now being monitored by the Air Force and U.S. Space Command.
   He said, “Capcom, this is Surgeon. I’m ready for private family conference.”
   “Roger, Surgeon,” said Capcom. “Ground Control, secure air to ground loop.” There was a pause, then, “Surgeon, proceed to PFC.” Jack’s heart was pounding. He took a deep breath and said, “Emma, it’s me.”
   “He might have lived if we’d gotten him home,” she said. “He might have had a chance.”
   “We weren’t the ones who stopped the evac! Again and again, NASA’s been overruled. We’re fighting to get you home, as soon as possible. If you’ll just hang in—”
   “It won’t be soon enough, Jack.” She said it quietly.
   Matter-of-factly. Her words chilled him to the marrow. “Diana is infected,” she said.
   “Are you sure?”
   “I just ran her amylase level. It’s rising. We’re watching her now. Waiting for the first symptoms. The stuff flew all over the module. We’ve cleaned it up, but we’re not sure who else was exposed.” She paused, and he heard her take a shaky breath. “You know those things you saw inside Andy and Jill? The things you thought were cysts? I sectioned one under the microscope. I’ve downlinked the images to Life Sciences. They’re not cysts, Jack. And they’re not spores.”
   “What are they?”
   “They’re eggs. Something is inside them. Something is growing.”
   “Growing? Are you saying they’re multicellular?”
   “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
   He was stunned. He had assumed they were dealing with a microbe, nothing larger than a single-celled bacteria. Mankind’s deadliest enemies have always been microbial—bacteria and viruses and protozoa, too small to be seen by the human eye. If Chimera was multicellular, then it was far more advanced than a simple bacteria.
   “The one I saw was still unformed,” she said. “It was more like a—a cluster of cells than anything else. But with vascular channels. And contractile movements. As though the whole thing was pulsating, like a culture of myocardial cells.”
   “Maybe it was a culture. A group of single cells clumped together.”
   “No. No, I think it was all one organism. And it was still young, still developing.”
   “Into what?”
   “USAMRIID knows,” she said. “These things were growing inside Kenichi Hirai’s corpse. Digesting his organs. When his disintegrated, they must have been splashed all over that orbiter.”
   Which the military immediately placed under quarantine, thought Jack, remembering the choppers. The space-suited men.
   “They’re growing in Nicolai’s corpse as well.”
   He said, “Jettison his body, Emma! Don’t waste any time.”
   “We’re doing it now. Luther’s preparing to release the body from the air lock. We have to hope the vacuum of space will kill this thing. It’s a historic event, Jack. The first human burial in space.” She gave a strange laugh, but it quickly choked off into silence.
   “Listen to me,” he said. “I’m going to bring you home. If I have to ride a goddamn rocket myself and come pick you up.”
   “They won’t let us come home. I know that now.”
   He had never heard such defeat in her voice, and it made him angry. Desperate. “Don’t wimp out on me, Emma!”
   “I’m only being realistic. I’ve seen the enemy, Jack. Chimera is a complex multicellular life-form. It moves. It reproduces. It turns our DNA, our genes, against us. If this is a bioengineered organism, some terrorist has just created the perfect weapon.”
   “Then he must have designed a defense as well. No one unleashes a new weapon without knowing how to protect himself against it.”
   “A fanatic might. A terrorist whose only interest is in killing people—lots of people. And this thing could do that. Not only it kill, it reproduces. It spreads.” She paused. And the sound exhaustion seeped into her voice. “Given those facts, it’s clear we won’t be coming home.” Jack pulled off the comm unit and dropped his head in his hands.
   For a long time he sat alone in the room, the sound of Emma’s still vivid in his mind. I don’t know how to save you, he thought. I don’t even know where to begin.
   He did not hear the door open. Only when Liz Gianni from Payload Operations said his name did he finally look up.
   “We have a name,” she said.
   He shook his head in bewilderment. “What?”
   “I told you, I was going to look up which experiment had to be destroyed because of fungal overgrowth. It turns out it was a cell culture. The principal investigator is a Dr. Helen Koenig, a biologist out in California.”
   “What about her?”
   “She’s disappeared. She resigned two weeks ago from the lab at SeaScience where she works. Hasn’t been heard from since. And Jack, here’s the kicker. I just spoke to someone at SeaScience. He told me that federal investigators raided Koenig’s lab on August ninth. They removed all her files.”
   Jack sat up straight. “What was Koenig’s experiment? What kind of cell culture did she send up?”
   “A single-celled marine organism. They’re called Archaeons.”

   “It was supposed to be a three-month protocol,” said Liz. “A study of how Archaeons multiply in microgravity. The culture began to show some bizarre results. Rapid growth, clump formation. It was multiplying at amazing rates.” They were walking along one of the pathways that wound through the JSC campus, past a pond where a fountain sprayed water into the listless air. The day was uncomfortably hot and muggy, but they felt safer talking outside, here, at least, they could speak in private.
   “Cells behave differently in space,” said Jack. That, in fact, the reason cultures were grown in orbit. On earth, tissue grows like a sheet, covering the surface of the culture plate. In space, absence of gravity allows tissues to grow in three dimensions, assuming shapes it can never achieve on earth.
   “Considering how exciting these developments were,” said Liz, “it’s surprising the experiment was abruptly terminated at six and a half weeks.”
   “Who terminated the experiment?” asked Jack.
   “The order came directly from Helen Koenig. Apparently, she analyzed the Archaeon samples which had been returned to earth aboard Atlantis and found them contaminated by fungi. She ordered the culture on ISS destroyed.”
   “And was it?”
   “Yes. But the weird part was how it was destroyed. The crew wasn’t allowed to just bag and dispose of it in the contaminated trash, which is what they’d normally do with a nonhazardous organism. No, Koenig told them to put the cultures in the hazardous waste disposal unit and incinerate them. And then to jettison the ash.”
   Jack stopped on the path and stared at her. “If Dr. Koenig is a bioterrorist, why would she destroy her own weapon?”
   “Your guess is as good as mine.” He thought about it for a moment, trying to make sense of it, but not coming up with an answer.
   “Tell me more about her experiment,” he said. “What, exactly, is an Archaeon?”
   “Petrovitch and I reviewed the scientific literature. Archaeons a bizarre domain of single-celled organisms called extremophiles—lovers of extreme conditions. They were discovered only twenty years ago, living—and thriving—near boiling volcanic vents on sea floor. They’ve also been found buried in polar ice caps and in rocks deep in the earth’s crust. Places we thought life couldn’t exist.”
   “So they’re sort of like hardy bacteria?”
   “No, they’re a completely separate branch of life. Literally, their name means the ancient ones. They’re so ancient, their origins date back to the universal ancestor of all life. A time before bacteria existed. Archaeons were some of the first inhabitants of our planet, and they’ll probably be the last to survive. No matter what happens—nuclear war, asteroid impact—they’ll be here, long after we’re extinct.” She paused. “In a sense, they’re earth’s ultimate conquerors.”
   “Are they infectious?”
   “No. They’re harmless to humans.”
   “Then this isn’t our killer organism.”
   “But what if something else was in that culture instead? What if she slipped in a different organism just before she shipped us payload? I find it interesting that Helen Koenig vanished just as this crisis was heating up.” Jack said nothing for a moment, his thoughts focused on why Helen Koenig would abruptly order her own experiment incinerated.
   He remembered what Gordon Obie had said at their meeting.
   Perhaps this was not an act of sabotage at all, but something just as frightening. A mistake.
   “There’s more,” said Liz. “Something else about this experiment that raises the red flag for me.”
   “What?”
   “How it got funded. Experiments that come from outside NASA have to compete for room aboard the station. The scientist fills out the OLMSA application, explaining the possible commercial uses for the experiment. It gets reviewed by us and through various committees before we prioritize which ones get launched. The process takes a long time—at least a year or more.”
   “How long did the Archaeon application take?”
   “Six months.”
   He frowned. “It was rushed through that quickly?”
   Liz nodded. “Fast track. It didn’t have to compete for NASA funding, like most experiments do. It was a commercial reimbursable. Someone paid to send up that experiment.” That was, in fact, one of the ways NASA kept ISS financially viable—by selling payload space aboard the station to commercial users.
   “So why would a company spend big bucks—and I do mean big bucks—to grow a test tube of essentially worthless organisms? Scientific curiosity?” She gave a skeptical snort. “I don’t think so.”
   “Which company paid for it?”
   “The firm Dr. Koenig worked for. SeaScience in La Jolla, California. They develop commercial products from the sea.” The despair Jack had felt earlier was finally lifting. Now he had information to work with. A plan of action. At last he could do something.
   He said, “I need the address and phone number of SeaScience. And the name of that employee you spoke to.”
   Liz gave a brisk nod. “You got it, Jack.”

August 17

   Diana awakened from a restless sleep, her head aching, the dreams still clouding her mind. Dreams of England, of her childhood home in Cornwall.
   Of the neat brick pathway leading to the front door, overhung by climbing roses. In her dream, she had pushed open the little gate and heard it squeal as it always did, the hinges in need of oil. She had started up the walkway to the stone cottage. Only a dozen paces and she would be on the front stoop, opening the door. Calling out that she was home, at last home. She wanted mother’s hugs, her mother’s forgiveness.
   But the half dozen paces became a dozen. Two dozen. And still the cottage was out of reach, the pathway stretching longer and longer until the house had receded to the size of a doll’s.
   Diana awakened with both arms reaching out, a cry of despair bursting from her throat.
   She opened her eyes and saw Michael Griggs staring at her.
   Though his face was partly obscured by a protective filter mask and goggles, she could see his expression of horror.
   She unzipped her sleep restraint and floated across the Russian service module. Even before she looked in the mirror at her own reflection, she knew what she would see.
   A flame of brilliant red was splashed across the white of her left eye.

   Emma and Luther spoke in hushed voices as they floated together in the dimly lit hab. Most of the station was still in power down, only the Russian segment, which had its own self-contained electrical supply, was operating at full power. The U.S. end of station was reduced to an eerie maze of shadowy tunnels, and in gloom of the hab, the brightest source of light was the computer screen, on which the Environmental Control and Life Support System diagrams were currently displayed. Emma and Luther were already familiar with the ECLS system, had memorized its components and subsystems during their training on earth. Now they had an urgent reason to review the system. They had a contagion on board, and they could not be certain if the entire station was contaminated. When Nicolai had coughed, spraying eggs throughout the Russian service module, the hatch had been open.
   Within seconds, the station’s air circulation system, designed to prevent pockets of dead air from building up, had swirled the airborne droplets into other parts of the station. Had the environmental-control system filtered out and trapped the airborne particles, as was designed to do? Or was the contagion everywhere now, in every module?
   On the computer screen were diagrams of airflow into and out of the station’s atmosphere. Oxygen was supplied by several independent sources. The primary source was the Russian Elektron generator, which electrolyzed water into hydrogen and oxygen. A solid-fuel generator using chemical cartridges was one of the backup sources, as were the oxygen storage tanks, which were recharged by the shuttle. A plumbed system distributed the oxygen, mixed with nitrogen, throughout the station, and fans kept the air circulating between modules. Fans also drew in air through various scrubbers and filters, removing carbon dioxide, water, and airborne particles.
   “These HEPA filters should’ve trapped every egg or larva within fifteen minutes,” said Luther, pointing to the high-efficiency particulate air filters in the diagram. “The system’s ninety-nine point nine percent efficient. Everything bigger than a third of a micron should’ve been filtered out.”
   “Assuming the eggs stayed airborne,” said Emma. “The problem is, they adhere to surfaces. And I’ve seen them move. They could crawl into crevices, hide behind panels where we can’t see them.”
   “It’d take months for us to rip out every panel and look for them. Even then, we’d probably miss a few.”
   “Forget ripping out the panels. That’s hopeless. I’ll change out the rest of the HEPA filters. Recheck the microbial air samplers tomorrow. We have to assume that’ll do it. But if those larvae crawled into the electrical conduits, we’ll never find them.” She sighed, her fatigue so heavy she had to struggle to think.
   “Whatever we do, it may not make a difference. It may be too late.”
   “It’s definitely too late for Diana,” Luther said softly.
   Today, the scleral hemorrhages had appeared in Diana’s eyes.
   She was now confined to the Russian service module. A plastic sheet had been draped over the hatchway, and no one was allowed in without a respiratory mask and goggles. A useless exercise, thought Emma. They had all breathe the same air, they had all touched Nicolai. Perhaps they were all infected.
   “We have to assume the Russian service module is now hopelessly contaminated,” said Emma.
   “That’s the only livable module with full power. We can’t close it off entirely.”
   “Then I guess you know what we have to do.” Luther gave a weary sigh.
   “Another EVA.”
   “We need to restore full power to this end,” she said. “You’ve got to finish those repairs on the beta gimbal assembly, or we’ll on the edge of catastrophe. If anything else goes wrong with our remaining power supply, we could lose Environmental Control next. Or the Guidance and Nav computers.” It was what the Russians used to call the coffin scenario. Without the power to itself, the station would begin to spin out of control.
   “Even if we do restore power,” said Luther, “it doesn’t address our real problem. The biocontamination.”
   “If we can contain it to the Russian end—”
   “But she’s incubating larvae right now! She’s like a bomb, waiting to go off.”
   “We jettison her body as soon as she dies,” said Emma. “Before she sheds any eggs or larvae.”
   “That may not be soon enough. Nicolai coughed up those eggs when he was still alive. If we wait till Diana dies…”
   “What are you suggesting, Luther?” Griggs’s voice startled them both, and they turned to look at him. He was staring at them from the hatchway, his face gleaming in the shadows. “Are you saying we shove her out while she’s still alive?”
   Luther drifted deeper into the gloom, as though retreating from attack. “Jesus, that’s not what I was saying.”
   “Then what were you saying?”
   “Just that the larvae—we know they’re inside her. We know it’s a matter of time.”
   “Maybe they’re inside all of us. Maybe they’re inside you. Growing, developing right now. Should we jettison your body?”
   “If that’s what it takes to stop it from spreading. Look, we all know she’s going to die. There’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve got to think ahead—”
   “Shut up!” Griggs shot across the hab and grabbed Luther by his shirt.
   Both men slammed into the far wall and bounced off again. They twisted around and around in midair, Luther trying to pry off Griggs’s hands, Griggs refusing to release him.
   “Stop it!” yelled Emma. “Griggs, let him go!” Griggs released his hold.
   The two men drifted apart, still breathing hard. Emma positioned herself like a referee between them.
   “Luther’s right,” she said to Griggs. “We have to think-ahead. We may not want to do it, but we have no choice.”
   “And if it was you, Watson?” Griggs shot back. “How would you like us discussing what to do with your body? How quickly we can bag you up, dispose of you?”
   “I’d expect you to be making those plans! There are three other lives at stake, and Diana knows it. I’m trying my best to keep alive, but right now, I don’t have a clue what will work. All I can do is pump her full of antibiotics and wait for Houston to give us answers. As far as I’m concerned, we’re on our own up here. We have to plan for the worst!”
   Griggs shook his head. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face haggard with grief. He said softly, “How can it get any worse?”
   She didn’t answer. She looked at Luther and read her own thoughts in his eyes. The worst is yet to come.

   “ISS, we have Surgeon standing by,” said Capcom. “Go ahead, ISS.”
   “Jack?” said Emma.
   She was disappointed to hear Todd Cutler’s voice instead. “It’s me, Emma. I’m afraid Jack’s left JSC for the day. He and Gordon took off for California.” Damn you, Jack, she thought. I need you.
   “We’re all in agreement down here about the EVA,” said Todd.
   “It needs to be done, and soon. My first question to you is, how’s Luther Ames? Both physically and mentally? Is he up to it?”
   “He’s tired. We’re all tired. We’ve hardly slept in the last twenty-four hours. The cleanup is keeping us busy.”
   “If we give him a day to rest, could he manage the EVA?”
   “Right now, a day of rest seems like an impossible dream.”
   “But would it be enough time?” She considered it for a moment. “I think so. He just needs to catch up on his sleep.”
   “Okay. Then here’s my second question. Are you up to an EVA?” Emma paused in surprise. “You want me to be his partner?”
   “We don’t think Griggs is up to it. He’s withdrawn from all communication with the ground. Our psychologist feels he’s too unstable at this point.”
   “He’s grieving, Todd. And very bitter that you won’t let us come home. You may not be aware of this, but he and Diana are…” She paused.
   “We know. And these emotions seriously undercut his effectiveness. It makes an EVA dangerous. That’s why you need to be Luther’s partner.”
   “What about a suit? The other EMU is too big for me.”
   “There’s an Orlan-M suit stored in the old Soyuz. It was tailored for Elena Savitskaya and was left on board several missions ago. Elena was about your height and weight. It should fit.”
   “It’s my first EVA.”
   “You’ve gone through WET-F training. You can handle it. Luther just needs you out there to assist.”
   “What about my patient? If I’m outside doing the EVA, who’s going to attend to her?”
   “Griggs can change her IVS, see to her needs.”
   “And if there’s a medical crisis? What if she starts to convulse?”
   Todd said quietly, “She’s dying, Emma. We don’t think there’s anything you can do to change that fact.”
   “That’s because you haven’t given me any useful information to work with! You’re more interested in keeping this station alive! It seems you care more about the goddamn solar arrays than the crew. We need a cure, Todd, or we’re all going to die here.”
   “We don’t have a cure. Not yet—”
   “Then get us the fuck home!”
   “You think we want to leave you stranded up there? You think we have a choice? It’s like the Nazi high command down here! They’ve got Air Force assholes posted all over Mission Control, and—” There was sudden silence.
   “Surgeon?” said Emma. “Todd?” Still no answer.
   “Capcom, I’ve lost Surgeon,” she said. “I need comm link restored
   “ A pause. Then, “Stand by, ISS.” She waited for what seemed like an eternity. When Todd’s voice finally came back on, it was subdued. Cowed, thought Emma.
   “They’re listening, aren’t they?” she said.
   “That’s affirmative.”
   “This is supposed to be a PMC! A private loop!”
   “Nothing’s private anymore. Remember that.”
   She swallowed hard, suppressing her anger. “Okay. Okay, I’ll dispense with the ranting. Just tell me what you’ve got on this organism. Tell me what I can use against it.”
   “I’m afraid there’s not much to tell you. I just spoke to USAMRIID. To a Dr. Isaac Roman, who’s in charge of the Chimera project. His news isn’t good. All their antibiotic and have failed. He says Chimera has so much foreign DNA it’s now closer to a mammalian genome than anything else. Which means any drug we use against it kills our tissues as well.”
   “Have they tried cancer drugs? This thing multiplies so fast, it’s behaving like a tumor. Could we attack it that way?”
   “USAMRIID tried antimitotics, hoping they could kill it during the cell-division phase. Unfortunately, the doses they needed so high they ended up killing the hosts as well. The entire gastrointestinal mucosa sloughed off. The host animals bled out.”
   The worst death imaginable, thought Emma. Massive hemorrhage into the bowels and stomach. Blood pouring from both mouth and rectum. She had witnessed such a death on earth. In space, it would be even more horrifying, giant globules of blood filling the cabin like bright red balloons, splashing onto every surface, every crew member.
   “Then nothing has worked,” she said.
   Todd said nothing.
   “Isn’t there something? Some cure that won’t kill the host?”
   “There was only one thing they mentioned. But Roman believes it’s only a temporary effect. Not a cure.”
   “What’s the treatment?”
   “A hyperbaric chamber. It requires a minimum of ten atmospheres of pressure. The equivalent of diving to a depth of over three hundred feet. Infected animals kept at those high pressures are still alive, six days after exposure.”
   “It has to be a minimum of ten atmospheres?”
   “Anything less, and the infection runs its course. The host dies.”
   She let out a cry of frustration. “Even if we could pump our air pressure that high, ten atmospheres is more than this station can tolerate.”
   “Even two would stress the hull,” said Todd. “Plus, you’d need a heliox atmosphere. You can’t reproduce that on the station. That’s why I didn’t want to mention it. In your situation, it’s useless information. We’ve already looked into the possibility of flying a hyperbaric chamber up to ISS, but equipment that bulky—something capable of producing pressures that high—needs to go into Endeavour’s cargo bay. The problem is, she’s already out of horizontal processing. It would take a minimum of two weeks to get chamber loaded up and launched. And it means docking the orbiter to ISS. Exposing Endeavour and its crew to your contamination.” He paused. “USAMRIID says that’s not an option.” She was silent, her frustration boiling into rage. Their only hope, a hyperbaric chamber, required their return to earth. That was not an option either.
   “There has to be something we can do with this information,” she said. “Explain to me. Why would hyperbaric therapy work? Why did USAMRIID even think of testing it?”
   “I asked Dr. Roman that same question.”
   “What did he say?”
   “That this was a new and bizarre organism. That it requires us to consider unconventional therapy.”
   “He didn’t answer your question.”
   “It’s all he would tell me.”
   Ten atmospheres of pressure was near the upper limit of human tolerance. Emma was an avid scuba diver, but she had never dared go deeper than a hundred twenty feet. A depth of three hundred feet was only for the foolhardy. Why had USAMRIID tested such extreme pressures? They must have had a reason, she thought. Something they know about this organism made them think it would work.
   Something they’re not telling us.

   The reason why Gordon Obie was known as the Sphinx had never been more apparent than on their flight to San Diego. They had signed out one of the T-38 jets from Ellington Field, with Obie at the controls and Jack squeezed into the single passenger seat. They hardly said a word to each other while in the air was not surprising. A T-38 is not conducive to conversation, since passenger and pilot sit one behind the other like two peas crammed in a pod.
   But even during the refueling stop in El Paso, when they had both climbed out to stretch their legs after an hour and a half in quarters, Obie could not be drawn into conversation. Only once, they stood on the edge of the tarmac drinking Dr. Peppers from the hangar vending machine, did he offer a spontaneous comment. He squinted up at the sun, already past its noon height, and said, “If she was my wife, I’d be scared shitless too.” Then he tossed his empty soda can into the trash bin and walked back to the jet.
   After landing at Lindbergh Field, Jack took the wheel of their rental car, and they headed north on Interstate 5 to La Jolla. said almost nothing, but simply stared out the window. Jack had always thought Gordon was more machine than man, and he imagined that computerlike brain registering the passing scenery like of data: HILL, OVERPASS, HOUSING DEVELOPMENT. Though Gordon had once been an astronaut, no one in the corps really knew him. He would dutifully show up at all their social events, but stand off by himself, a quiet and solitary figure sipping nothing stronger than his favorite Dr. Pepper. He seemed perfectly at ease with his own silence, accepted it as part of his personality, he’d accepted his comically protruding ears and his bad haircuts.
   If no one really knew Gordon Obie, it was because he saw no reason to reveal himself.
   That was why his comment in El Paso had surprised Jack. If she was my wife, I’d be scared shitless too.
   Jack could not imagine the Sphinx ever being scared, nor could he imagine him being married. As far as he knew, Gordon had always been a bachelor.
   Afternoon fog was already rolling in from the sea by the time they wound their way up the La Jolla coastline. They almost missed the entrance to SeaScience, the turnoff was marked by one small sign, and the road beyond it seemed to lead into a grove of eucalyptus trees. Only when they’d driven a half mile down the road did they spot the building, a surreal, almost fortresslike white concrete structure overlooking the sea.
   A woman in a white lab coat met them at the security desk.
   “Rebecca Gould,” she said, shaking their hands. “I work down the hall from Helen. I spoke to you this morning.” With her shorn and stout build, Rebecca might have passed for either sex. Even her deep voice was ambiguous.
   They took the elevator down to the basement level. “I don’t really know why you insisted on coming out here,” said Rebecca.
   “As I told you on the phone, USAMRIID’s already picked Helen’s lab clean.” She pointed to a doorway. “You can see for yourself what little they left behind.” Jack and Gordon stepped into the lab and looked around in dismay.
   Empty filing cabinet drawers hung open. Shelves and countertops had been swept clean of all equipment, and not even a test rack was in sight.
   Only the wall decorations had been left behind, mostly framed travel posters, seductive photographs of tropical beaches and palm trees and brown women glistening in the sun.
   “I was in my lab down the hall the day they showed up. Heard a lot of upset voices and breaking glass. I looked out my door and saw men carting out files and computers. They took everything. The incubators with her cultures. Racks of seawater samples. Even the frogs she kept in that terrarium over there. My assistants tried to stop the raid, and they got hauled out for questioning. Naturally, I called upstairs to Dr. Gabriel’s office.”
   “Gabriel?”
   “Palmer Gabriel. Our company president. He came down himself, along with a SeaScience attorney. They couldn’t stop the raid, either. The Army just came in with their carton boxes and hauled everything away. They even took the employees’ lunches!” She opened the refrigerator and pointed to the empty shelves. “I don’t know what the hell they thought they’d find.” She turned to face them. “I don’t know why you’re here, either.”
   “I think we’re all looking for Helen Koenig.”
   “I told you. She resigned.”
   “Do you know why?”
   Rebecca shrugged. “That’s what USAMRIID kept asking. Whether she was angry at SeaScience. Whether she was mentally unstable. I certainly didn’t see that. I think she was just tired. Burned out from working here seven days a week, for God knows how long.”
   “And now no one can find her.”
   Rebecca’s chin jutted up in anger. “It’s not a crime to leave town. It doesn’t mean she’s a bioterrorist. But USAMRIID treated this like a crime scene. As if she was growing Ebola virus or something. Helen was studying Archaeons. Harmless sea microbes.”
   “Are you certain that was the only project going on in this lab?”
   “Are you asking whether I kept tabs on Helen? Of course not. I’m too busy doing my own work. But what else would Helen be doing? She’s devoted years to Archaeon research. That particular strain she sent up to ISS was her discovery. She considered it her personal triumph.”
   “Is there a commercial application for Archaeons?” Rebecca hesitated.
   “Not that I’m aware of.”
   “Then why study them in space?”
   “Haven’t you heard of pure science, Dr. McCallum? Knowledge for its own sake? These are weird, fascinating creatures. Helen found her species in the Galapagos Rift, near a volcanic vent, at depth of nineteen thousand feet. Six hundred atmospheres of pressure, at boiling temperatures, this organism was thriving. It shows us how adaptable life can be. It’s only natural to wonder what would happen if you took that life-form out of its extreme conditions and brought it up to a friendlier environment. Without thousands of pounds of pressure crushing it. Without even gravity distort its growth.”
   “Excuse me,” interrupted Gordon, and they both turned to look at him. He had been wandering around the lab, poking in empty drawers and looking into trash cans. Now he was standing beside one of the travel posters hanging on the wall. He pointed to a snapshot that had been taped to a corner of the picture frame. It a large aircraft parked on a tarmac.
   Posed under the wing were the two pilots. “Where did this photo come from?”
   Rebecca shrugged. “How would I know? This is Helen’s lab.”
   “It’s a KC-135,” said Gordon.
   Now Jack understood why Gordon had focused on the photo.
   The KC-135 was the same aircraft NASA used to introduce astronauts to microgravity. When flown in giant parabolic curves, it was like an airborne roller coaster, producing up to thirty seconds of weightlessness per dive.
   “Did Dr. Koenig use a KC-135 in any of her research?” asked Jack.
   “I know she spent four weeks out at some airfield in New Mexico. I have no idea what kind of plane they were using.”
   Jack and Gordon exchanged thoughtful looks. Four weeks of KC-135 research would cost a fortune.
   “Who would authorize an expense like that?” asked Jack.
   “It would have to be approved by Dr. Gabriel himself.”
   “Could we speak to him?”
   Rebecca shook her head. “You don’t just drop in on Palmer Gabriel. Even the scientists who work here hardly ever see him. has research facilities all over the country, so he may not even be in town right now.”
   “Another question,” Gordon interrupted. He had wandered over to the empty terrarium and was peering down at the moss and pebbles lining the bottom. “What’s this enclosure for?”
   “The frogs. I told you about them, remember? They were Helen’s pets. USAMRIID carted them off along with everything else.”
   Gordon suddenly straightened and looked at her. “What kind of frogs?”
   She gave a startled laugh. “Do you NASA guys always ask such weird questions?”
   “I’m just curious what variety one would keep as a pet.”
   “I think they were some sort of leopard frog. Me, I’d recommend a poodle instead. They’re a lot less slimy.” She glanced at her watch. “So, gentlemen. Any other questions?”
   “I think I’m through here, thank you,” said Gordon. And without another word he walked out of the lab.
   They sat in the rental car, the sea mist now swirling past their windows, moisture filming the glass. Rana pipiens, thought Jack, northern leopard frog. One of the three species on Chimera’s genome.
   “This is where it came from,” he said. “This lab.”
   Gordon nodded.
   “USAMRIID knew about this place a week ago,” said Jack.
   “How did they find out? How did they know Chimera came from SeaScience? There has to be some way to force them to share their information with us.”
   “Not if it’s a matter of national security.”
   “NASA is not the enemy.”
   “Maybe they think we are. Maybe they believe the threat comes from inside NASA,” said Gordon.
   Jack looked at him. “One of ours?”
   “It’s one of two reasons why Defense would keep us out of the loop.”
   “And the other reason?”
   “Because they’re assholes.” Jack gave a laugh and slumped back against his seat. Neither one of them spoke for a moment. The day had already wearied them both, and they still had the flight back to Houston.
   “I feel like I’m punching at thin air,” said Jack, pressing his hand to his eyes. “I don’t know who or what I’m fighting. But I can’t afford to stop fighting.”
   “She’s not a woman I’d give up on, either,” said Gordon.
   Neither one of them had said her name, but they both knew they were talking about Emma.
   “I remember her first day at Johnson,” said Gordon. In the dim light of the misted windows, Gordon’s homely face was sketched in shades of gray on gray. He sat very still, his gaze focused ahead, a somber and colorless man. “I addressed her incoming astronaut class. I looked around the room at all those new faces. And there she was, front and center. Not afraid to be picked on. Not afraid of humiliation. Not afraid of anything.” He paused and gave a small shake of his head. “I didn’t like sending her up. Every time she was chosen for a crew assignment, I wanted to scratch her name off the list. Not because she wasn’t good. Hell, no. I didn’t like watching her ride off to that launchpad, knowing what I know about everything that can go wrong.” He suddenly stopped talking. It was more than Jack had ever heard him say in one stretch, more than Gordon had ever revealed of his feelings. Yet none of what he’d said came as a surprise to Jack. He thought of the countless ways he loved Emma. And what man would not love her? he wondered. Even Gordon Obie is not immune.
   He started the car, and the windshield cleared as the wipers scraped away the veil of mist. It was already five o’clock, they would be flying back to Houston in darkness. He pulled out of the parking space and drove toward the exit.
   Halfway across the lot, Gordon said, “What the hell is this?” Jack slammed on the brakes as a black sedan barreled toward them through the mist. Now a second car screeched into the parking lot and skidded to a stop, its front bumper just kissing theirs.
   Four men emerged.
   Jack froze as his door was yanked open and a voice commanded, “Gentlemen, please step out of the car. Both of you.”
   “Why?”
   “You will step out of the car now.”
   Gordon said softly, “I get the feeling this is not negotiable.” Reluctantly they both climbed out and were swiftly patted down and relieved of their wallets.
   “He wants to talk to you two. Get in the backseat.” The man pointed to one of the black cars.
   Jack glanced around at the four men watching them. Resistance is futile just about summed up their situation. He and Gordon walked to the black car and slid into the rear seat.
   There was a man sitting in front. All they saw was the back of his head and shoulders. He had thick silvery hair, swept back, wore a gray suit.
   His window whisked down, and the two confiscated wallets were handed to him. He slid the window shut again, a darkly tinted barrier against prying eyes. For a few minutes he studied the contents of the wallets.
   Then he turned to face his backseat visitors. He had dark, almost obsidian eyes, and they strangely devoid of reflected images. Two black holes trapping light. He tossed the wallets into Jack’s lap.
   “You’re a long way from Houston, gentlemen.”
   “Must have been that wrong turn in El Paso,” said Jack.
   “What does NASA want here?”
   “We want to know what was really in that cell culture you sent up.”
   “USAMRIID’s already been here. They swept the place clean. They have everything. Dr. Koenig’s research files, her computers. If you have any questions, I suggest you ask them.”
   “USAMRIID’S not talking to us.”
   “That’s your problem, not mine.”
   “Helen Koenig was working for you, Dr. Gabriel. Don’t you know what goes on in your own labs?” Jack saw, by the man’s expression, that he had guessed correctly.
   This was the founder of SeaScience. Palmer Gabriel. An angelic last name for a man whose eyes gave off no light.
   “I have hundreds of scientists working for me,” said Gabriel. “I have facilities in Massachusetts and Florida. I can’t possibly know everything that goes on in those labs. Nor can I be held for any crimes my employees commit.”
   “This is not just any crime. This is a bioengineered chimera—an organism that’s killed an entire shuttle crew. And it came from your lab.”
   “My researchers direct their own projects. I don’t interfere. I’m a scientist myself, Dr. McCallum, and I know that scientists work best when allowed complete independence. The freedom to indulge their curiosity. Whatever Helen did was her business.”
   “Why study Archaeons? What was she hoping to find?”
   He turned to face forward, and they saw only the back of his head, with its silvery sweep of hair. “Knowledge is always useful. At first we may not recognize its value. For instance, what benefit is there to knowing the reproductive habits of the sea slug?
   Then we learn about all the valuable hormones we can extract from that lowly sea slug. And suddenly, its reproduction is of utmost importance.”
   “And what’s the importance of Archaeons?”
   “That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s what we do here. Study an organism until we learn its usefulness.” He pointed toward his research facility, now shrouded in mist. “You’ll notice it’s by sea. All my buildings are by the sea. It’s my oil field. That’s where I look for the next new cancer drug, the next miracle cure. It makes perfect sense to look there, because that’s where we come from. Our birthplace. All life comes from the sea.”
   “You haven’t answered my question. Is there a commercial value for Archaeons?”
   “That remains to be seen.”
   “And why send them into space? Was there something she discovered on those KC-135 flights? Something to do with weightlessness?”
   Gabriel rolled down his window and signaled to the men. The back doors swung open. “Please step out now.”
   “Wait,” said Jack. “Where is Helen Koenig?”
   “I haven’t heard from her since she resigned.”
   “Why did she order her own cell cultures incinerated?” Jack and Gordon were hauled out of the backseat and shoved toward their rental car.
   “What was she afraid of?” Jack yelled.
   Gabriel did not answer. His car window rolled shut, and his face disappeared behind the shield of tinted glass.

August 18

   Luther vented the last air in the crew lock to space and opened the EVA hatch. “I’ll go first,” he said. “You take it slow. It’s the first time out.”
   That first glimpse of the emptiness beyond made Emma grasp the edge of the hatchway in panic. She knew the sensation was common, and that it would pass. That brief paralysis of fear gripped almost everyone on their first spacewalk. The mind had trouble accepting the vastness of space, the absence of up or down.
   Millions of years of evolution had imprinted in the human brain the terror of falling, and this was what Emma now struggled to overcome.
   Every instinct told her that if she released her grip, if she ventured out the hatchway, she would plummet, shrieking, in an endless fall. On a rational level, she knew this would not happen.
   She was connected to the crew lock by her tether. If that tether broke, she could use her SAFER jet pack to propel herself back to the station.
   It would take an unlikely series of independent events to cause a catastrophe.
   Yet that is exactly what has happened to this station, she thought.
   Mishap after mishap. Their own Titanic in space. She could not shake the premonition of yet another disaster.
   Already they had been forced to violate protocol. Instead of the usual overnight camp-out at reduced air pressures, they had spent only four hours in the air lock. Theoretically, it should be long enough to prevent the bends, but any change in normal procedures added an element of risk.
   She took a few deep breaths and felt the paralysis begin to melt away.
   “How ya doing?” she heard Luther ask over her comm-unit.
   “I’m just … taking a minute to enjoy the view,” she said.
   “No problems?”
   “No. I’m A-OK.” She released her grip and floated out of the hatch.
   Diana is dying, Griggs stared with mounting bitterness at the closed-circuit TV monitors showing Luther and Emma at work outside the station.
   Drones, he thought. Obedient robots, leaping at Houston’s command. For so many years, he, too, had been a drone. Only now did he understand his position in the greater scheme of things. He, and everyone else, were disposable. On-orbit replacement units whose real function was to maintain NASA’s glorious hardware. We may all be dying up here, but yes, sir, we’ll keep the place in shipshape order.
   They could count him out. NASA had betrayed him, had betrayed all of them. Let Watson and Ames play the good little soldiers, he would have no more of it.
   Diana was all he cared about.
   He left the hab and headed toward the Russian end of the station.
   Slipping under the plastic sheeting draped over the hatchway, he entered the RSM. He didn’t bother to put on his mask or goggles, what difference did it make? They were all going to die.
   Diana was strapped to the treatment board. Her eyes were swollen, the lids puffy. Her abdomen, once so flat and firm, now bloated. Filled with eggs, he thought. He pictured them growing inside her, expanding beneath that pale tent of skin.
   Gently he touched her cheek. She opened her blood-streaked eyes and struggled to focus on his face.
   “It’s me,” he whispered. He saw that she was trying to free her hand from the wrist restraint. He clasped her hand in his. “You need to keep your arm still, Diana. For the IV.”
   “I can’t see you.” She gave a sob. “I can’t see anything.”
   “I’m here. I’m right with you.”
   “I don’t want to die this way.” He blinked away tears and started to say something, false reassurance that she would not die, that he would not let her.
   But the words wouldn’t come. They had always been truthful with each other, he would not lie to her now. So he said nothing.
   She said, “I never thought…”
   “What?” he prompted gently.
   “That this is … how it would happen. No chance to play the hero. Just sick and useless.” She gave a laugh, then grimaced in pain. “Not my idea of going out … in a blaze of glory.” A blaze of glory. That was how every astronaut imagined it would be to die in space. A brief moment of terror, and then the quick demise. Sudden decompression or fire.
   Never had they imagined a death like this, a slow and painful ebbing away as one’s is consumed and digested by another life-form. Abandoned by the ground. Quietly sacrificed to the greater good of mankind.
   Expendable. He could accept it for himself, but he could not accept Diana’s expendability. He could not accept the fact he was about to lose her.
   It was hard to believe that on the first day they’d met, during training at JSC, he had thought her cold and forbidding, an icy blonde with too much confidence. Her British accent had put him off as well, because it made her sound so superior. It was crisp cultured compared to his Texas drawl. By the first week, they disliked each other so much they were scarcely speaking to each other.
   By the third week, at Gordon Obie’s insistence, they’d reluctantly declared a truce.
   By the eighth week, Griggs was showing up at her house. Just for a drink at first, two professionals reviewing their upcoming mission. Then the mission talk had given way to conversations of more personal nature.
   Griggs’s unhappy marriage. The thousand and one interests he and Diana had in common. It all led, of course, to the inevitable.
   They had concealed the affair from everyone at JSC. Only here, on the station, had their relationship become apparent to their colleagues. Had there been even a whiff of suspicion before this, Blankenship would have scrubbed them from the mission. Even in this modern day and age, an astronaut’s divorce was a black mark against him. And if that divorce had resulted from a liaison with another member of the corps—well, so much for any future flight assignments. Griggs would have been reduced to an invisible member of the corps, neither seen nor heard.
   For the last two years he had loved her. For two years, whenever he had lain beside his sleeping wife, he had yearned for Diana and plotted out the ways they might be together. Someday, they would be together, even if they had to resign from NASA. That was the dream that had sustained him through all those unhappy nights. Even after these two months with her in close quarters, even after their occasional flares of temper, he had not stopped loving her. He had not surrendered the dream. Until now.
   “What day is this?” she murmured.
   “It’s Friday.” He began to stroke her hair again. “In Houston, it’s five-thirty in the afternoon. Happy hour.”
   She smiled. “TGIF.”
   “They’re sitting at the bar now. Chips and margaritas. God, I could do with a stiff drink. A nice sunset. You and me, on the lake…” The tears glistening on her lashes almost broke his heart. He no longer gave a damn about biocontamination, about the dangers of infecting himself.
   With his bare hand he wiped away the tears.
   “Are you in pain?” he said. “Do you need more morphine?”
   “No. Save it.” Someone else will need it soon, was what she didn’t say.
   “Tell me what you want. What I can do for you.”
   “Thirsty,” she said. “All that talk of margaritas.” He gave a laugh.
   “I’ll mix one up for you. The nonalcoholic version.”
   “Please.” He floated across to the galley and opened the food locker. It was stocked with Russian supplies, not the same items as in the U.S. hab. He saw vacuum-packed pickled fish. Sausages. An of unappetizing Russian staples. And vodka—a small bottle of it, sent by the Russians, ostensibly for medicinal purposes.
   This may be the last drink we’ll ever have together.
   He shook some vodka into two drink bags and restowed the bottle. Then he added water to the bags, diluting hers so that it was barely alcoholic. Just a taste, he thought, to bring back happy memories. To remind her of the evenings they had spent together, watching sunsets from her patio. He gave the bags a few good shakes to mix the water and vodka. Then he turned to look at her.
   A bright red balloon of blood was oozing from her mouth.
   She was convulsing. Her eyes were rolled back, her teeth clamped down on her tongue. One raw and ragged slice of it was still hanging on by a thread of tissue.
   “Diana!” he screamed.
   The balloon of blood broke off and the satiny globule drifted away. At once another began to form, fed by the blood pouring out of the torn flesh.
   He grabbed a plastic bite block, already taped to the restraint board, and tried to force it between her teeth, to protect her tissues from any more trauma. He could not pry the teeth apart.
   The human jaw has one of the strongest muscles in the body, and hers was clamped tight. He grabbed the syringe of Valium, premeasured and ready to inject, and shoved the tip into the IV stopcock. Even as he pressed the plunger, her seizure was starting to fade. He gave her the whole dose.
   Her face relaxed. Her jaw fell limp.
   “Diana?” he said. She didn’t respond.
   The new bubble of blood was growing, spilling from her mouth. He had to apply pressure, to stop it.
   He opened the medical kit, found the sterile gauze, and ripped open the package, sending a few squares flying away. He placed himself behind her head and gently opened her mouth to expose the torn tongue.
   She coughed and tried to turn her face away. She was choking on her own blood. Aspirating it into her lungs.
   “Don’t move, Diana.” With his right wrist pressing down on her lower teeth, to keep her jaw open, he wadded up a bundle of gauze in his left hand and began to dab away the blood. Her neck suddenly jerked taut in a new convulsion, and her jaw snapped shut.
   He screamed, the meaty part of his hand caught between her teeth, the pain at once so terrible his vision began to blacken. He felt warm blood splash against his face, saw a bright globule fountaining up. His blood, mingled with hers. He tried to pull free, her teeth had sunk in too deeply. The blood was pouring out, the globule inflating to the size of a basketball. Severed artery! He could not pry her jaw open, the seizure had caused her muscle to contract with superhuman strength.
   Blackness was closing in on his vision.
   In desperation, he rammed his free fist against her teeth. The jaw did not relax.
   He hit her again. The basketball of blood flew apart in a dozen smaller globules, splashing his face, his eyes. Still he could her jaw. There was so much blood now it was as though he were swimming in a lake of it, unable to draw in a breath of clean air.
   Blindly he swung his fist against her face and felt bones crack, yet he could not pull free. The pain was crushing, unbearable.
   Panic seized him, blinding him to anything but making the agony stop. He was scarcely aware of what he was doing as he hit her again. And again.
   With a scream he finally yanked his hand free and went flying backward, clutching his wrist, releasing swirls of blood in ribbons all around him. It took him a moment to stop caroming off walls, to shake his vision clear. He focused on Diana’s face, on the bloodied stumps of her teeth. The damage done by his own fist.
   His howl of despair echoed off the walls, filling his ears with the sound of his own anguish. What have I done? What have I done?
   He floated to her side, held her shattered face in his hands. He no longer felt the pain of his own wound, it receded to nothing, overshadowed by the greater horror of his own actions.
   He gave another howl, this time of rage. He battered his fist against the module wall. Ripped the plastic sheeting that covered the hatchway.
   We’re all dying anyway! Then he focused on the medical kit.
   He reached in and grabbed a scalpel.
   Flight Surgeon Todd Cutler stared at his console and felt a stab of panic. On his screen were the biotelemetry readings for Diana Estes. Her EKG tracing had just burst into a sawtooth pattern of rapid spikes. To his relief, it was not sustained. Just as abruptly, the tracing reverted back to a rapid sinus rhythm.
   “Flight,” he said, “I’m seeing a problem with my patient’s heart rhythm. Her EKG just showed a five-second run of ventricular tachyvardia.”
   “Significance?” Woody Ellis responded briskly.
   “It’s a potentially fatal rhythm if it’s prolonged. Right now she’s back in sinus, around one thirty. That’s faster than she’s been running. Not dangerous, but it worries me.”
   “Your advice, Surgeon?”
   “I’d give her antiarrhythmics. She needs IV lidocaine or amiodarone. They’ve got both drugs in their ALS pack.”

   “Ames and Watson are still out on EVA. Griggs’ll have to give it.”
   “I’ll talk him through it.”
   “Okay. Capcom, let’s get Griggs on comm.” As they waited for Griggs to respond, Todd kept a close eye on the monitor. What he saw worried him.
   Diana’s pulse rate was increasing, 135, 140. Now a brief burst of 160, the spikes in a flutter of patient movement or electrical interference. What was happening up there?
   Capcom said, “Commander Griggs is not responding.”
   “She needs that lidocaine,” said Todd.
   “We can’t get him on comm.” Either he can’t hear us or he’s refusing to answer, thought Todd.
   They’d been worried about Griggs’s emotional health. Had he withdrawn so completely he’d ignore an urgent communication?
   Todd’s gaze suddenly froze on his console screen. Diana Estes was going in and out of V tach. Her ventricles were contracting so rapidly, they could not pump with any efficiency. They could not maintain her blood pressure.
   “She needs that drug now!” he snapped.
   “Griggs is not responding,” said Capcom.
   “Then get the EVA crew inside!”
   “No,” Flight cut in. “They’re at a delicate point in repairs. We can’t interrupt them.”
   “She’s turning critical.”
   “We pull in the EVA crew, that ends all repairs for the next twenty-four hours.” The crew could not pop inside and go right out again. They needed time to recover, additional time to repeat decompression cycle.”
   Though Woody Ellis didn’t say it aloud, he was probably thinking the same thing as everyone else in the room, Even if they did call the crew inside to assist, it would make little difference to Diana Estes. Her death was inevitable.
   To Todd’s horror, the EKG tracing was now in sustained V tach. It was not recovering.
   “She’s going downhill!” he said. “Get one of them inside now! Bring in Watson!” There was a second’s hesitation.
   Then Flight said, “Do it.” Why isn’t Griggs responding?
   Frantically Emma pulled herself from handhold to handhold, moving as fast as she could along the main truss. She felt slow and clumsy in the Orlan-M suit, and her hands ached from the effort of flexing against the resistance of bulky gloves. She was already exhausted from the repair work, and now fresh sweat was soaking into her lining, and her muscles quivered from fatigue.
   “Griggs, respond. Goddamnit, respond!” she snapped into her comm link.
   ISS remained silent.
   “What’s Diana’s status?” she demanded between panted breaths.
   Todd’s voice came on. “Still in V tach.”
   “Shit.”
   “Don’t rush, Watson. Don’t get careless!”
   “She’s not going to last. Where the fuck is Griggs?” She was breathing so hard now she could barely keep up the conversation. She forced herself to concentrate on grabbing the hand rung, on keeping her tether untangled. Clambering off the truss, she made a lunge for the ladder, but was suddenly snapped a halt.
   Her sleeve had caught on a corner of the work platform.
   Slow down. You’re going to get yourself killed.
   Gingerly she unsnagged her sleeve and saw there was no puncture.
   Heart still hammering, she continued down the ladder and pulled herself into the air lock. Quickly she swung the hatch shut and opened the pressure equalization valve.
   “Talk to me, Todd,” she snapped as the air lock began to repressurize.
   “What’s the rhythm?”
   “She’s now in coarse V fib. We still can’t get Griggs on comm.”
   “We’re losing her.”
   “I know, I know!”
   “Okay, I’m up to five psi—”
   “Air-lock integrity check. Don’t skip it.”
   “I don’t have time.”
   “Watson, no fucking shortcuts.” She paused and took a deep breath. Todd was right. In the hostile environment of space, one must never take shortcuts. She completed the air-lock integrity check, finished repressurization, opened the next hatch, leading into the equipment lock. There she swiftly removed her gloves. The Russian Orlan-M suit was easier to doff than the American EMU, but it still took time to swing open the rear life-support system and wriggle out. I’ll never make it in time, she thought as she furiously kicked her feet free from the lower torso.
   “Status, Surgeon!” she barked into her comm assembly.
   “She’s now in fine fib.” A terminal rhythm, thought Emma. This was their last chance to save Diana.
   Now clad only in her water-cooling garment, she opened the hatch leading into the station. Frantic to reach her patient, she pushed off the wall and dove headfirst through the hatch opening.
   Wetness splashed her face, blurring her vision. She missed the handhold and collided with the far wall. For a few seconds she drifted in confusion, blinking away the sting. What did I get in my eyes? she thought.
   Not eggs. Please, not eggs … her vision Slowly cleared, but even then, she could not comprehend what she was seeing. Floating all around her in the shadowy node were giant globules.
   She felt more wetness brush her hand, and she looked down at the blackish stain soaking into her sleeve, at the dark blooming here and there on her water-cooling garment. She held her sleeve up to one of the node lights.
   The stain was blood.
   In horror she gazed at the giant globules hanging in the shadows.
   So much of it … Quickly she closed the hatch to prevent the contamination from spreading into the air lock. It was too late to protect the rest of the station, the globules had spread everywhere. She dove into the hab, opened the CCPK, and donned protective mask and goggles.
   Maybe the blood was not infectious. Maybe she could still protect herself.
   “Watson?” said Cutler.
   “Blood … there’s blood everywhere!”
   “Diana’s rhythm is agonal—there’s not much left to jump-start!”
   “I’m on my way!” She pushed out of the node and entered the tunnellike Zarya. The Russian module seemed blindingly bright after the barely lit U.S. end, the globules of blood like gaily balloons floating in the air. Some had collided with the walls, splattering Zarya a brilliant red. Popping out the far end of the module, she could not avoid one giant bubble floating directly in her path.
   Reflexively she closed her eyes as it splattered her goggles, obscuring her view. Drifting blindly, she wiped her sleeve across the goggles to clear away the blood.
   And found herself staring straight at Michael Griggs’s chalkwhite face.
   She screamed. In horror she thrashed uselessly at empty air, going nowhere.
   “Watson?” She stared at the large bubble of blood still clinging to the gaping wound on his neck. This was the source of all the blood—a slashed carotid artery. She forced herself to touch the intact side of his neck, to search for a pulse. She could not feel one.
   “Diana’s EKG is flat line!” said Todd.
   Emma’s stunned gaze shifted to the hatch leading to the RSM, where Diana was supposed to be isolated. The plastic sheeting was gone, the module was open to the rest of the station.
   In dread, she entered the RSM. Diana was still strapped to the patient restraint board. Her face had been battered beyond recognition, her teeth smashed to splinters. A balloon of blood was oozing from her mouth.
   The squeal of the cardiac monitor at last drew Emma’s attention.
   A flat line traced across the screen. She reached over to off the alarm, and her hand froze in midair. Glistening on the power switch was a blue-green gelatinous clump.
   Eggs. Diana has already shed eggs. She has already released Chimera into the air.
   The monitor alarm seemed to build to an unbearable shriek, yet Emma remained motionless, staring at that cluster of eggs. They seemed to shimmer and recede out of focus. She blinked, and as her vision cleared again, she remembered the moisture hitting her face, stinging her eyes as she had dived through the air-lock hatch.
   She had not been wearing goggles then. She could still feel the wetness on her cheek, cool and clinging.
   She reached up to touch her face, and stared at the eggs, like quivering pearls, on her fingertips.
   The squeal of the cardiac alarm had become unbearable. She flipped off the monitor, and the squeal ceased. The silence that followed was just as alarming. She could not hear the hiss of the fans. They should be drawing in air, pulling it through the HEPA filters for cleansing.
   There’s too much blood in the air. It has blocked all the filters. The rise in the pressure gradient across the filters had tripped the sensors, automatically shutting off the overheated fans.
   “Watson, please respond!” said Todd.
   “They’re dead.” Her voice broke into a sob. “They’re both dead!
   Now Luther’s voice broke into the loop. “I’m coming in.”
   “No,” she said. “No—”
   “Just hang on, Emma. I’ll be right there.”
   “Luther, you can’t come in! There’s blood and eggs everywhere. This station is no longer habitable. You have to stay in the air lock.”
   “That’s not a long-term solution.”
   “There is no fucking long-term solution!”
   “Look, I’m in the crew lock now. I’m closing the outer hatch. Starting repress—”
   “The vent fans have all shut off. There’s no way to clean this air.”
   “I’m up to five psi. Pausing for integrity check.”
   “If you come in, you’ll be exposing yourself!”
   “Going to full repress.”
   “Luther, I’ve already been exposed! I got splashed in the eyes.”
   She took a deep breath. It came out in a sob. “You’re the only one left. The only one with any chance of surviving.” There was a long silence.
   “Jesus, Emma,” he murmured.
   “Okay. Okay, listen to me.” She paused to calm herself. To think logically. “Luther, I want you to move into the equipment lock. It should still be relatively clean in there, and you can take off your helmet. Then turn off your personal comm assembly.”
   “What?”
   “Do it. I’m heading for Node One. I’ll be right on the other side of the hatch, talking to you.”
   Now Todd broke in, “Emma? Emma, do not break off air-to-ground loop—”
   “Sorry, Surgeon,” she murmured, and turned off her comm assembly.
   A moment later, she heard Luther say, over the station’s hardline intercom system, “I’m in the equipment lock.” They were talking in private now, their conversation no longer monitored by Mission Control.
   “There’s one option left for you,” said Emma. “The one you’ve been pushing for all along. I can’t take it, but you can. You’re clean. You won’t bring the disease home.”
   “We already agreed on this. No one stays behind.”
   “You’ve got three hours left of uncontaminated air in your EMU. If you keep your helmet on in the CRV and go straight to deorbit, you could make it down in time.”
   “You’ll be stranded.”
   “I’m stranded here anyway!” She took another deep breath, and spoke more calmly. “Look, we both know this goes against orders. It could be a very bad idea. How they’ll respond is anyone’s guess—that’s the gamble. But, Luther, it’s your choice to make.
   “There’ll be no way for you to evac.”
   “Take me out of the equation. Don’t even think of me.” She added, softly, “I’m already dead.”
   “Emma, no—”
   “What do you want to do? Answer that. Think only about yourself.”
   She heard him take a deep breath. “I want to go home.”
   So do I, she thought, blinking away tears. Oh, God, so do I. “Put on your helmet,” she said. “I’ll open the hatch.”

   Jack ran up the stairs to Building 30, flashed his badge at Security, and headed straight to Special Vehicle Operations.
   Gordon Obie intercepted him just outside the control room.
   “Jack, wait. You go in there and raise hell, they’ll toss you out. Take a minute to cool down, or you won’t be any help to her.”
   “I want my wife home now.”
   “Every one wants them home! We’re trying the best we can, but the situation has changed. The whole station is now contaminated. The filter system’s off. The EVA crew never had a chance to complete the gimbal repairs, so they remain in power down. And they’re not talking to us.”
   “What?”
   “Emma and Luther have cut off communications. We don’t know what’s going on up there. That’s why they rushed you back—to help us get through to them.” Jack stared through the open doorway, into the Special Vehicle Operations Room. He saw men and women at their consoles, performing their duties as always. It suddenly enraged him that flight controllers could remain so calm and efficient. That the deaths of two more astronauts did not seem to alter their cold professionalism. The cool demeanor of everyone in the room only magnified his own grief, his own terror.
   He walked into the control room. Two uniformed Air Force officers stood beside Flight Director Woody Ellis, monitoring the comm loops. They were a disturbing reminder that the room was not under NASA’s control. As Jack moved along the back row, toward the surgeon’s console, several controllers shot him sympathetic looks. He said nothing, but sank into the chair next to Todd Cutler. He was acutely aware that just behind him, in the viewing gallery, other Air Force officers from U.S. Space Command were watching the room.
   “You’ve heard the latest?” said Todd softly.
   Jack nodded. There was no longer any EKG tracing on the monitor, Diana was dead. So was Griggs.
   “Half the station’s still in power down. And now they’ve got eggs floating in the air.” And blood as well. Jack could picture what it must be like aboard the station. The lights dimmed. The stench of death. splattering the walls, clogging the HEPA filters. An orbiting of horrors.
   “We need you to talk to her, Jack. Get her to tell us what’s happening up there.”
   “Why aren’t they talking?”
   “We don’t know. Maybe they’re pissed at us. They have a right to be. Maybe they’re too traumatized.”
   “No, they must have a reason.” Jack looked at the front screen, showing the station’s orbital path above the earth. What are you thinking, Emma?
   He slipped on the headset and said, “Capcom, this is Jack McCallum. I’m ready.”
   “Roger, Surgeon. Stand by, and we’ll try them again.” They waited. ISS did not respond.
   At the third row of consoles, two of the controllers suddenly glanced back over their shoulders, at Flight Director Ellis. Jack heard nothing over the comm loop, but he saw the Odin controller, the controller in charge of onboard data networks, rise from his chair and lean forward to whisper across his console to the secondrow controllers.
   Now the OPS controller, in the third row, took off his headset, stood up, and stretched. He started up the side aisle, walking casually, as though headed for a bathroom break. As he passed by surgeon’s console, he dropped a piece of paper in Todd Cutler’s and continued out of the room.
   Todd unfolded the note and shot Jack a stunned look. “The station’s reconfigured their computers to ASCR mode,” he whispered.
   “The crew’s already started CRV sep sequence.” Jack stared back in disbelief. ASCR, or assured safe crew return, was the computer config meant to support crew evacuation. He glanced quickly around the room.
   None of the controllers was saying a word about this over the loop. All Jack saw were rows of squared shoulders, everyone’s gaze focused tightly on their consoles. He glanced sideways at Woody Ellis. Ellis stood motionless. The body language said it all. He knows what’s going on. And he’s not saying a thing, either.
   Jack broke out in a sweat. This was why the crew wasn’t talking.
   They had made their own decision, and they were forging ahead with it.
   The Air Force would not be in the dark for long.
   Through their Space Surveillance Network of radar and optical sensors, they could monitor objects as small as a baseball in low earth orbit. As soon as the CRV separated, as soon as it became independent orbital object, it would come to the attention of Command’s control center in Cheyenne Mountain Air Station. The million-dollar question was, How would they respond?
   I hope to God you know what you’re doing, Emma.
   After CRV sep, it would take twenty-five minutes for the evac vehicle to bring up guidance and landing targets, another fifteen minutes to set up the deorbit burn. Another hour to land. U.S. Space Command would have them identified and tracked long before the CRV could touch down.
   In the second row, the OSO flight controller raised his hand in a casual thumbs-up. With that gesture, he’d silently announced news, The CRV had separated. For better or worse, the crew was on its way home.
   Now the game begins.
   The tension in the room coiled tighter. Jack hazarded a glance at the two Air Force officers, but the men seemed oblivious to the situation, one of them kept looking at the clock, as though to be elsewhere.
   The minutes ticked past, the room strangely quiet. Jack leaned forward, his heart hammering, sweat soaking his shirt. By now CRV would be drifting outside the station’s envelope. Their target would be identified, their guidance system locked onto GPS satellites.
   Come on, come on, thought Jack. Go to deorbit now!
   The sound of a ringing telephone cut the silence. Jack glanced sideways and saw one of the Air Force monitors answer it. Suddenly he went rigid and turned to Woody Ellis.
   “What the hell is going on here?” Ellis said nothing.
   The officer quickly typed on Ellis’s console keyboard and stared at the screen in disbelief. He grabbed the phone. “Yes, sir. I’m, that’s a confirmation. The CRV has separated. No, sir, I don’t know how it—Yes, sir, we have been monitoring the loop, but—” The oficer was red-faced and sweating as he listened to the tirade from the receiver.
   When he hung up, he was shaking with rage.
   “Turn it around!” he ordered.
   Woody Ellis answered with barely disguised contempt. “It isn’t a Soyuz capsule. You can’t command it to drive around like a goddamn automobile.”
   “Then stop it from landing!”
   “We can’t. It’s a one-way trip home.” Three more Air Force officers walked swiftly into the room.
   Jack recognized General Gregorian of the U.S. Space Command—the man now in authority over NASA operations.
   “What’s the status?” Gregorian snapped.
   “The CRV is undocked but still in orbit,” the red-faced officer replied.
   “How soon before they reach atmosphere?”
   “Uh—I don’t have that information, sir.” Gregorian turned to the flight director. “How soon, Mr. Ellis?
   “It depends. There are a number of options.”
   “Don’t give me a fucking engineering lecture. I want an answer. I want a number.”
   “Okay.” Ellis straightened and looked him hard in the eye. “Anywhere from one to eight hours. It’s up to them. They can stay in orbit for four revolutions max. Or they can deorbit now and be on the ground in an hour.”
   Gregorian picked up the phone. “Mr. President, I’m afraid there’s not much time to decide. They could deorbit any minute now. Yes, sir, I know it’s a hard choice. But my recommendation remains the same as Mr. Profitt’s.”
   What recommendation? thought Jack with a surge of panic.
   An Air Force officer called out from one of the flight consoles, “They’ve started their deorbit burn!”
   “We’re running out of time, sir,” said Gregorian. “We need your answer now.” There was a long pause. Then he nodded, with relief.
   “You’ve made the right decision. Thank you.” He hung up and turned to the Air Force officers. “It’s a go.”
   “What’s a go?” said Ellis. “What are you people planning to do?
   His questions were ignored. The Air Force officer picked up the phone and calmly issued the order, “Stand by for EKV launch.” What the hell is an EKV? thought Jack. He looked at Todd and saw by his blank expression that he didn’t know what was being launched, either.
   It was Todd, the trajectory controller, who walked over to their console and quietly answered the question. “Exoatmospheric kill vehicle,” he whispered. “They’re going to intercept.”
   “Target must be neutralized before it descends to atmosphere,” said Gregorian.
   Jack shot to his feet in panic. “No!” Almost simultaneously, other controllers rose from their chairs in protest. Their shouts almost drowned out Capcom, who had to yell at the top of his voice to be heard.
   “I have ISS on comm! ISS is on comm!” ISS? Then someone is still aboard the station. Someone has been left behind.
   Jack cupped his hand over his earpiece and listened to the downlinked voice.
   It was Emma. “Houston, this is Watson on ISS. Mission Specialist Ames is not infected. I repeat, he is not infected. He is only crew member returning aboard CRV. I urgently request you allow the vehicle’s safe landing.”
   “Roger that, ISS,” said Capcom.
   “You see? There’s no reason to shoot it down,” Ellis said to Gregorian.
   “Stop your EKV launch!”
   “How do we know Watson’s telling the truth?” countered Gregorian.
   “She must be telling the truth. Why else would she stay behind? She’s just stranded herself up there. The CRV was the lifeboat she had!” The impact of those words made Jack go numb. The heated conversation between Ellis and Gregorian suddenly seemed to fade out.
   Jack was no longer focusing on the fate of the CRV. He could think only of Emma, alone now, and trapped on the station, with no way to evacuate.
   She knows she is infected. She has stayed behind to die.
   “CRV has completed deorbit burn. It’s descending. Trajectory is on the front screen.” Tracing across the world map at the front of the room was a small blip representing the CRV and its lone human passenger.
   They heard him now, on comm.
   “This is Mission Specialist Luther Ames. I am approaching entry altitude, all systems nominal.” The Air Force officer looked at Gregorian. “We’re still standing by for EKV launch.”
   “You don’t have to do this,” said Woody Ellis. “He’s not sick. We can bring him home!”
   “The craft itself is probably contaminated,” said Gregorian.
   “You don’t know that!”
   “I can’t take that chance. I can’t risk the lives of people on earth.”
   “Godddamnit, this is murder.”
   “He disobeyed orders. He knew what our response would be.” Gregorian nodded to the Air Force officer.
   “EKVS have been launched, sir.” Instantly the room hushed. Woody Ellis, pale and shaken, stared at the front screen, at the multiple trajectory tracings, toward an intersecting point.
   The minutes went by in dead silence. At the front of the room, one of the women controllers began to cry softly.
   “Houston, I’m approaching entry interface.” It was a shock to hear Luther’s cheery voice suddenly crackle on the comm. “I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d have someone meet me on the ground, ‘cause I’m gonna need help getting out of this EMU.” No one responded. No one had the heart to.
   “Houston?” said Luther, after a moment of silence. “Hey, you guys still there?” At last Capcom managed to reply, in an uneven voice, “Uh, roger, CRV . We’ll have the beer keg waiting for you, Luther of’ buddy. Dancing girls. The whole works .”
   “Geez, you guys have loosened up since we last spoke. Okay, looks like I’m bout ready for LOS. You keep that beer cold, and I—” There was a loud burst of static. Then the transmission went dead.
   The blip on the front screen exploded into a shocking sunburst of fragments, scattering into delicate pixels of dust.
   Woody Ellis crumpled into his chair and dropped his head in his hands.
   “Securing air-to-ground loop,” said Capcom. “Stand by, ISS.”
   “Talk to me, Jack . Please talk to me, Emma pleaded silently as she floated in the hab’s semidarkness. With the circulation fans shut down, the module was so quiet she could hear the whoosh of her own pulse, the movement of air rushing in and out of her lungs.
   She was startled when Capcom’s voice suddenly said, “Air-to-ground secure. You may proceed to PFC.”
   “Jack?” she said.
   “I’m here. I’m right here, sweetheart.”
   “He was clean! I told them he was clean—”
   “We tried to stop it! The order came straight from the White House. They didn’t want to take any chances.”
   “It’s my fault.” Her exhaustion suddenly gave way to tears. She was alone and scared. And haunted by her catastrophically wrong decision. “I thought they’d let him come back. I thought it was best chance of staying alive.”
   “Why did you stay behind, Emma?”
   “I had to.” She took a deep breath and said, “I’m infected.”
   “You were exposed. That doesn’t mean you’re infected.”
   “I just ran my own blood tests, Jack. My amylase level is rising.”
   He said nothing.
   “I’m now eight hours postexposure. I should have another twenty-four to forty-eight hours before I … can no longer function.” Her voice had steadied. She sounded strangely calm now, as though she were talking about a patient’s impending death. Not her own. “That’s enough time to get a few things in order. Jettison bodies. Change out some of the filters, and get the fans working again. It should make cleanup easier for the next crew. If there is a next crew…” Jack still hadn’t spoken.
   “As for my own remains…” Her voice had steadied to numb dispassion, all emotions suppressed. “When the time comes, I think the best thing I can do, for the good of the station, is to go EVA. Where I can’t contaminate anything after I die. After my body…”
   She paused. “The Orlan is easy enough to get into without assistance. I have Valium and narcotics on hand. Enough to put me under. So I’ll be asleep when my air runs out. You know, Jack, it’s not such a bad way to go, when you think about it. Floating outside. Looking at the earth, the stars. And just drifting off to sleep.” She heard him then. He was crying.
   “Jack,” she said softly. “I love you. I don’t know why things apart between us. I know some of it had to be my fault.”
   He drew in a shuddering breath. “Emma, don’t.”
   “It’s so stupid that I waited this long to tell you. You probably think I’m only saying it now because I’m going to die. But, Jack, honest-to-God truth is—”
   “You’re not going to die.” He said it again, with anger. “You not going to die.”
   “You’ve heard Dr. Roman’s results. Nothing has worked.”
   “The hyperbaric chamber has.”
   “They can’t get a chamber up here in time. And without a lifeboat, I can’t get home. Even if they’d let me return.”
   “There’s got to be a way. Something you can do to reproduce the chamber’s effect. It’s working on infected mice. It’s keeping them alive, so it’s doing something. They’re the only ones who’ve survived.” No, she suddenly realized. Not the only ones.
   Slowly, she turned and stared at the hatchway leading into Node 1. The mouse, she thought. Is the mouse still alive?
   “Emma?”
   “Stand by. I’m going to check something in the lab.” She swam through Node I, into the U.S. lab. The stench of dried blood was just as strong in here, and even in the gloom, could see the dark splatters on the walls. She floated across to animal habitat, pulled out the mouse enclosure, and shone a flashlight inside.
   The beam captured a pitiful sight. The bloated mouse was in its agonal throes, limbs thrashing out, mouth open, drawing in gulps of air.
   You can’t be dying, she thought. You’re the survivor, the exception to the rule. The proof that there’s still hope for me.
   The mouse twisted, body corkscrewing in agony. A thread of blood curled out from between the hind legs, broke off into droplets. Emma knew what would come next, the final flurry of seizures as the brain dissolved into a soup of digested proteins. saw a fresh pulse of blood stain the white fur of the hindquarters.
   And then she saw something else, something pink, protruding between the legs.
   It was moving.
   The mouse thrashed again.
   The pink thing slid all the way out, writhing and hairless.
   Tethered to its abdomen was a single glistening strand. An cord.
   “Jack,” she whispered. “Jack!”
   “I’m here.”
   “The mouse—the female—”
   “What about it?”
   “These last three weeks, she’s been exposed again and again to Chimera, and she hasn’t gotten sick. She’s the only one who’s survived.”
   “She’s still alive?”
   “Yes. And I think I know why. She was pregnant.” The mouse began to writhe again. Another pup slid out in a glistening veil of blood and mucus.
   “It must have happened that night when Kenichi put her with the males,” she said. “I haven’t been handling her. I never realized…”
   “Why would pregnancy make a difference? Why should it be protective?” Emma floated in the gloom, struggling to come up with an answer. The recent EVA and the shock of Luther’s death had left her physically drained. She knew that Jack was just as exhausted.
   Two tired brains, working against the ticking time bomb of her infection.
   “Okay. Okay, let’s think about pregnancy,” she said. “It’s a complex physiological condition. It’s more than just the gestation of a fetus. It’s an altered metabolic state.”
   “Hormones. Pregnant animals are chemically high on hormones. If we can mimic that state, maybe we can reproduce what’s happened in that mouse.” Hormone therapy. She thought of all the different chemicals circulating in a pregnant woman’s body. Estrogen. Progesterone. Prolactin. Human chorionic gonadotropin.
   “Birth control pills,” said Jack. “You could mimic pregnancy with contraceptive hormones.”
   “We have nothing like that on board. It’s not part of the medical kit.”
   “Have you checked Diana’s personal locker?”
   “She wouldn’t take contraceptives without my knowledge. I’m the medical officer. I’d know about it.”
   “Check it anyway. Do it, Emma.” She shot out of the lab. In the Russian service module, she quickly pulled open the drawers in Diana’s locker.
   It felt wrong, be pawing through another woman’s private possessions.
   Even dead woman’s. Among the neatly folded clothes she uncovered a private stash of candy. She hadn’t known that Diana loved sweets, there was so much about Diana she would never know. In another drawer she found shampoo and toothpaste and tampons. No birth control pills.
   She slammed the drawer shut. “There’s nothing on this station I can use!”
   “If we launched the shuttle tomorrow—if we got the hormones up to you—”
   “They won’t launch! And even if you could send up a whole damn pharmacy, it’d still take three days to get to me!” In three days, she would most likely be dead.
   She clung to the blood-splattered locker, her breaths coming hard and fast, every muscle taut with frustration. With despair.
   “Then we have to approach this from another angle,” said Jack.
   “Emma, stay with me on this! I need you to help me think.” She released a sharp breath. “I’m not going anywhere.”
   “Why would hormones work? What’s the mechanism? We know they’re chemical signals—an internal communication system at the cellular level. They work by activating or repressing gene expression. By changing the cell’s programming…” He was rambling now, letting his stream of consciousness lead him toward solution. “In order for a hormone to work, it has to bind to a specific receptor on the target cell. It’s like a key, in search the right lock in which to fit. Maybe if we studied the data from SeaScience—if we could find out what other DNA Dr. Koenig grafted onto this organism’s genome—we might know how to shut off Chimera’s reproduction.”
   “What do you know about Dr. Koenig? What other research has she worked on? That might be a clue.”
   “We have her curriculum vitae. We’ve seen her published papers on Archaeons. Other than that, she’s something of a mystery to us. So is SeaScience. We’re still trying to dig up information.” That will take precious time, she thought. I don’t have much of it left.
   Her hands ached from gripping Diana’s locker. She relaxed her hold and drifted away, as though swept along on a tide of despair.
   Loose items from Diana’s locker floated around her in the air, evidence of Diana’s sweet tooth. Chocolate bars. M&M’s. A cellophane package of crystallized ginger candy. It was that last that Emma suddenly focused on. Crystallized ginger.
   Crystals.
   “Jack,” she said. “I have an idea.” Her heart was racing as she swam out of the Russian service module and headed back into the U.S. Lab. There she turned on payload computer. The monitor glowed an eerie amber in the darkened module. She called up the operations data files and clicked on “ESA.” European Space Agency. Here were all the procedures and reference materials required to operate the ESA payload experiments.
   “What are you thinking, Emma?” came Jack’s voice over her comm unit.
   “Diana was working on protein crystal growth, remember? Pharmaceutical research.”
   “Which proteins?” he shot back, and she knew he understood exactly what she was thinking.
   “I’m scrolling down the list now. There are dozens…” The protein names raced up the screen in a blur. The cursor halted on the entry she’d been searching for, “Human chorionic gonadotropin.”
   “Jack,” she said softly. “I think I’ve just bought myself some time.”
   “What’ve you got?”
   “HCG. Diana was growing the crystals. I’d have to do an IVA to get to it. They’re in the ESA module, and that’s at vacuum. If I start depress now, I could get to those crystals in four or five hours.”
   “How much HCG is on board?”
   “I’m checking.” She opened the experiment file and quickly scanned the mass measurement data.
   “Emma?”
   “Hold on, hold on! I’ve got the most recent mass here. I’m looking up normal HCG levels in pregnancy.”
   “I can get those for you.”
   “No, I’ve found it. Okay. Okay, if I dilute this crystal mass in normal saline … plug in my body weight as forty-five kilograms…” She typed in the numbers. She was making wild assumptions here. She didn’t know how quickly HCG was metabolized, or what its half-life would be.
   The answer at last onscreen.
   “How many doses?” said Jack.
   She closed her eyes. It’s not going to last long enough. It’s not going to save me.
   “Emma?” She released a deep breath. It came out as a sob. “Three days.”
   It was 1:45 A.M. and Jack’s vision was blurred from fatigue, words on the computer screen fading in and out of focus.
   “There must be more,” he said. “Keep searching.”
   Gretchen Liu, seated at the keyboard, glanced up at Jack and Gordon in frustration. She had been sound asleep when they called her to come in, and she’d arrived without her usual camera-ready makeup and contact lenses. They had never seen their normally elegant public affairs officer looking so unglamorous. Or wearing glasses, for that matter—thick horn-rim glasses that magnified pinched eyes. “I’m telling you guys, this is all I can find on Lexisnexis search. Almost nothing on Helen Koenig. On SeaScience, there’s only the usual corporate news releases. And as for the Palmer Gabriel, well, you can see for yourself he doesn’t court publicity. In the last five years, the only place his name turns up in media is on the financial pages of The Wall Street Journal articles about SeaScience and its products. There’s no data. There’s not even a photo of the man.”
   Jack slumped back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. The three of them had spent the last two hours in the Public Affairs Office, combing every article about Helen Koenig and SeaScience they could find on Lexis-Nexis. They had turned up numerous hits for SeaScience, dozens of articles in which its products had been mentioned, from shampoos to pharmaceuticals to fertilizers. But almost nothing had turned up on Koenig or Gabriel.
   “Try the name Koenig again,” said Jack.
   “We’ve done every possible spelling variation on her name,” said Gretchen. “There’s nothing.”
   “Then type in the word Archaeons.” Sighing, Gretchen typed in Archaeons and clicked on “Search.” A numbingly long string of article citations filled the screen.
   “Alien Earth Creatures. Scientists Hail Discovery of New Branch of Life.” (Washington Post)
   “Archaeons to Be Subject of International Conference.” (Miami Herald)
   “Deep Sea Organisms Offer Clues to Life’s Origins.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)
   “Guys, this is hopeless,” said Gretchen. “It’ll take us all night to read every article on this list. Why don’t we just call it a night get some sleep?”
   “Wait!” Gordon said. “Scroll down to this one.” He pointed to a citation at the bottom of the screen,” Scientist Dies in Galapagos Diving Accident (New York Times).”
   “The Galapagos,” said Jack. “That’s where Dr. Koenig discovered the Archaeon strain. In the Galapagos Rift.” Gretchen clicked on the article and the text appeared. The story was two years old.
   COPYRIGHT, The New York Times.
   SECTION, International News.
   HEADLINE, “Scientist Dies in Deep Sea Diving Accident.”
   BYLINE, Julio Perez, NYT Correspondent.
   BODY, An American scientist studying Archaeon marine organisms was killed yesterday when his one-man submersible became wedged in an undersea canyon of the Galapagos Rift. The body of Dr. Stephen D. Ahearn was not recovered until this morning, when cables from the research vessel Gabriella were able to haul the minisub to the surface.
   “We knew he was still alive down there, but there was nothing we could do,” said a fellow scientist aboard Gabriella. “He was trapped at nineteen thousand feet. It took us hours to free his submersible and haul it back to the surface.” Dr. Ahearn was a professor of geology at the University of California, San Diego. He resided in La Jolla, California.
   Jack said, “The ship’s name was Gabriella.” He and Gordon looked at each other, both of them struck by the same startling thought, Gabriella.
   Palmer Gabriel.
   “I’ll bet you this was a SeaScience vessel,” said Jack, “and Helen Koenig was aboard.” Gordon’s gaze shifted back to the screen. “Now this is interesting. What do you make of the fact Ahearn was a geologist?
   “So what?” said Gretchen, yawning.
   “What was a geologist doing aboard a marine research vessel?”
   “Checking out the rocks on the sea floor?”
   “Let’s do a search on his name.”
   Gretchen sighed. “You guys owe me a night’s worth of beauty sleep.” She typed in the name Stephen D. Ahearn and clicked on “Search.” A list appeared, seven articles in all. Six of them were about undersea death in the Galapagos.
   One article was from the year prior to his death, “UCSD Professor to Present Latest Findings on Tektite Research. Will Be Keynote Speaker at International Geological Conference in Madrid.” (San Diego Union)
   Both men stared at the screen, too stunned for a moment to utter a word.
   Then Gordon said softly, “This is it, Jack. This is what they’ve been trying to hide from us.” Jack’s hands had gone numb, his throat dry. He focused on a single word, the word that told them everything.
   Tektite.

   JSC director Ken Blankenship’s house was one of the anonymous tract homes in the suburb of Clear Lake, where so many JSC officials lived. It was a large house for a bachelor, and Jack saw that the front yard was immaculately groomed, every hedge clipped into submission. That yard, so well lit at three A.M. , was exactly what one would expect of Blankenship, who was notorious for his perfectionism as well as his almost paranoid obsession with security. There’s probably a surveillance camera trained on us right this moment, thought Jack as he and Obie waited for Blankenship to answer the front door. It took several rings of the doorbell before they saw lights come on inside.
   Then Blankenship appeared, a squat little Napoleon dressed in a bathrobe.
   “It’s three in the morning,” said Blankenship. “What are you guys doing here?”
   “We need to talk,” said Gordon.
   “Is there something wrong with my phone? You couldn’t have called first?”
   “We can’t use the phone. Not about this.” They all stepped into the house. Only after the front door swung shut did Jack say, “We know what the White House is trying to hide. We know where Chimera comes from.” Blankenship stared at him, his irritation over a disturbed night’s sleep instantly forgotten. Then he looked at Gordon, seeking confirmation of Jack’s statement.
   “It explains everything,” said Gordon. “USAMRIID’s secrecy. The White House’s paranoia. And the fact that this organism behaves unlike anything our doctors have ever encountered.”
   “What did you find out?” Jack answered the question. “We know Chimera has human, mouse, and amphibian DNA. But USAMRIID won’t tell us what other DNA is on the genome. They won’t tell us what Chimera really is, or where it comes from.”
   “You told me last night the bug was sent up in a SeaScience payload. A culture of Archaeons.”
   “That’s what we thought. But Archaeons are not dangerous organisms. They’re incapable of causing disease in humans—that’s why the experiment was accepted by NASA. Something about this particular Archaeon is different. Something SeaScience didn’t tell us.”
   “What do you mean, different?”
   “Where it came from. The Galapagos Rift.” Blankenship shook his head. “I don’t see the significance.”
   “This culture was discovered by scientists aboard the vessel Gabriella, a ship belonging to SeaScience. One of those was a Dr. Stephen Ahearn, who was flown out to Gabriella, apparently as a last-minute consultant. Within a week, he was dead. His minisub became trapped at the bottom of the rift, and he suffocated.” Blankenship said nothing, but his gaze remained focused on Jack’s.
   “Dr. Ahearn was known for his research on tektites,” said Jack. “Those are glassy fragments produced whenever a meteor collides with the earth. That was Dr. Ahearn’s field of expertise. The geology of meteors and asteroids.” Still Blankenship said nothing. Why isn’t he reacting?
   Jack wondered. Doesn’t he understand what this means?
   “SeaScience flew Ahearn to the Galapagos because they needed a geologist’s opinion,” said Jack. “They needed confirmation of what they’d found on the sea floor. An asteroid.” Blankenship’s face had gone rigid. He turned and walked toward the kitchen.
   Jack and Gordon followed him. “That’s why the White House is so scared of Chimera!” said Jack. “They know where it comes from. They know what it is.” Blankenship picked up the telephone and dialed. A moment later, he said, “This is JSC director Kenneth Blankenship. I speak to Jared Profitt. Yes, I know what time it is. This is an emergency, so if you could connect me to his home…” There was a moment’s silence. Then he said into the phone, “They know. No, did not tell them. They found out on their own.” A pause. “Jack McCallum and Gordon Obie. Yes, sir, they’re standing right here in my kitchen.” He handed the receiver to Jack. “He wants to speak to you.”
   Jack took the phone. “This is McCallum.”
   “How many people know?” was the first thing Jared Profitt asked him.
   That question instantly told Jack how sensitive this information was. He said, “Our medical people know. And a few people in Life Sciences.” That was all he’d say, he knew better than to name names.
   “Can you all keep it quiet?” asked Profitt.
   “That depends.”
   “On what?”
   “On whether your people cooperate with us. Share information with us.”
   “What do you want, Dr. McCallum?”
   “Full disclosure. Everything you’ve learned about Chimera. The autopsy results. The data from your clinical trials.”
   “And if we don’t share? What happens?”
   “My colleagues at NASA start faxing every news agency in the country.”
   “Telling them what, exactly?”
   “The truth. That this organism is not terrestrial.” There was a long silence. Jack could hear his own heartbeat thudding in the receiver.
   Have we guessed right? Have we really uncovered the truth?
   Profitt said, “I’ll authorize Dr. Roman to tell you everything. He’ll be expecting you at White Sands.” The phone went dead.
   Jack hung up and looked at Blankenship. “How long have you known?” Blankenship’s silence only fueled Jack’s anger. He took a threatening step forward, and Blankenship backed up against the wall. “How long have you known?”
   “Only—only a few days. I was sworn to secrecy!”
   “Those were our people dying up there!”
   “I had no choice! This has got everyone terrified! The White House. Defense.” Blankenship took a deep breath and looked Jack straight in the eye. “You’ll understand what I’m talking about. When you get to White Sands.”

August 20

   With one end gripped in her teeth, Emma yanked the tourniquet tight, and the veins of her left arm plumped up like blue worms beneath the pale skin. She gave her antecubital vein a quick swipe with alcohol and winced at the prick of the needle. Like a junkie desperate for a fix, she injected the entire contents of the syringe, releasing the tourniquet halfway through. When she was finished, she closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift as she imagined the HCG molecules, like tiny stars of hope, coursing up her veins, into her heart and lungs. streaming out into arteries and capillaries. She imagined she could already feel its effect, the headache melting away, the hot flames of her fever smothered to a dying glow. Three doses left, she thought. Three more days.
   She imagined herself drifting out of her own body, and she saw herself, as though from a distance, curled up like a mottled a coffin. A bubble of mucus spilling out of her mouth, breaking into bright squirming threads like maggots.
   Abruptly she opened her eyes and realized that she had been sleeping.
   Dreaming. Her shirt was saturated with sweat. It was a good sign. It meant that her fever had eased off.
   She massaged her temples, trying to force out the images from her dream, but she could not, reality and nightmares had merged into one.
   She stripped off the sweat-soaked shirt and put on a clean one from Diana’s locker. Despite the bad dreams, that brief nap had refreshed her, and she was alert again, ready to search for new solutions. She floated into the U.S. Lab and pulled up all the files on the computer.
   It was an extraterrestrial organism, Todd Cutler had informed her, and everything NASA now knew about the life-form had been transmitted to her onboard computers. She reviewed the files, hoping to find some new inspiration, some approach that no one else had thought of. Everything she read was dismally familiar.
   She opened the genome file. A nucleotide sequence spilled across the monitor in an unending stream of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs.
   Here was Chimera’s genetic code—parts of it, anyway. The parts USAMRIID had chosen to share with NASA. She stared, hypnotized, as the lines of code marched down the screen. This was the essence of the alien life-form now growing inside her. It was the key to the enemy. If only she knew how to use it.
   The key.
   She suddenly thought of what Jack had said earlier, about hormones. In order for a hormone to work, it has to bind to a receptor on the target cell. It’s like a key in search of just the lock in which to fit.
   Why would a mammalian hormone like HCG suppress the reproduction of an alien life-form? she wondered. Why would an extraterrestrial organism, so foreign to anything on earth, properly fitting locks to our keys?
   On the computer, the nucleotide sequence had finished scrolling to the end. She stared at the blinking cursor and of the earth-born species whose DNA had been raided by Chimera.
   By acquiring those new genes, this alien life-form had become part human. Part mouse. Part amphibian.
   She got on the comm with Houston. “I need to speak to somebody in Life Sciences,” she said.
   “Any one in particular?” asked Capcom.
   “An amphibian expert.”
   “Stand by, Watson.” Ten minutes later, a Dr. Wang from NASA Life Sciences came on the loop. “You had a question about amphibians?” he asked.
   “Yes, about Rana pipiens, the northern leopard frog.”
   “What can I tell you about it?”
   “What happens if you expose the leopard frog to human hormones?”
   “Any hormone in particular?”
   “Estrogen, for instance. Or HCG.” Dr. Wang answered without hesitation.
   “Amphibians in general are adversely affected by environmental estrogens. It’s been quite a bit, actually. A number of experts think the worldwide decline in frog populations is due to estrogenlike substances polluting streams and ponds.”
   “What estrogenlike substances?”
   “Certain pesticides, for instance, can mimic estrogens. They disrupt the frogs’ endocrine systems, making it impossible for them to reproduce or thrive.”
   “So it doesn’t actually kill them.”
   “No, it just disrupts reproduction.”
   “Are frogs in particular sensitive to this?”
   “Oh, yes. Far more than mammals. Plus, frogs have permeable skin, so they’re susceptible to toxins in general. That’s sort of their, well, Achilles’ heel.” Achilles’ heel. She fell silent for a moment, thinking about that.
   “Dr. Watson?” said Wang. “You have any other questions?”
   “Yes. Is there any disease or toxin that would kill a frog, but not harm a mammal?”
   “That’s an interesting question. When it comes to toxins, it would depend on the dose. You give a little arsenic to a frog, you’d kill it. But arsenic would kill a man as well, if he’s given a larger dose. Then again, there are microbial diseases, certain bacteria viruses, that only kill frogs. I’m not a physician, so I’m not absolutely certain they’re harmless to humans, but—”
   “Viruses?” she cut in. “Which ones?”
   “Well, Ranaviruses, for instance.”
   “I’ve never heard of those.”
   “Only amphibian experts are familiar with them. They’re DNA viruses. Part of the Iridovirus family. We think they’re the cause of the tadpole edema syndrome. The tadpoles swell up and hemorrhage.”
   “And that’s fatal to them?”
   “Very much so.”
   “Does this virus kill people as well?”
   “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. I do know Ranaviruses have killed off whole populations of frogs around the world.” The Achilles’ heel, she thought. I’ve found it.
   By adding the leopard frog’s DNA to its own genome, Chimera had become part amphibian. It had also acquired an amphibian’s vulnerabilities .
   She said, “Is there any way to obtain live samples of one of these Ranaviruses? To test against Chimera?”
   There was a long silence. “I get it,” said Dr. Wang. “No one’s tried that yet. No one’s even considered—”
   “Can you get the virus?” she cut in.
   “Yes. I know two amphibian research labs in California who are working with live Ranaviruses.”
   “Then do it. And get hold of Jack McCallum. He needs to know about this.”
   “He and Gordon Obie just left for White Sands. I’ll reach them there.”

   Tumbleweeds skittered across the road, swept along in a stinging cloud of sand. The men drove past the guardhouse, past the electrified fence, and into the barren Army compound. Jack and Gordon stepped out of the vehicle and squinted up at the sky. The sky was a dusky orange, obscured by windblown dust. The color of sunset, not high noon. They had managed to catch only a few hours of sleep before they’d taken off from Ellington, and it hurt Jack’s eyes just to see the light of day.
   “This way, gentlemen,” the driver said.
   They followed the soldier into the building.
   It was a different reception from the last time Jack had visited.
   This time the Army escort was polite and respectful. This time Dr. Isaac Roman was waiting at the front desk, although he did not look particularly happy about their arrival.
   “Only you are allowed to come with me, Dr. McCallum,” he said. “Mr. Obie will have to wait here. That was the agreement.
   “I made no such agreement,” said Jack.
   “Mr. Profitt did, on your behalf. He’s the only reason you’re being allowed in this building. I haven’t a great deal of time, let’s get this over with.” He turned and walked to the elevators.
   “Now, there’s your standard Army-issue asshole,” said Gordon.
   “Go on. I’ll wait here.”
   Jack followed Roman into the elevator.
   “First stop is subbasement level two,” said Roman, “where we house our animal trials.” The elevator door opened, and they confronted a wall of glass. It was a viewing window.
   Jack approached the window and stared at the laboratory beyond. Inside were a dozen workers wearing biocontamination suits. Cages held spider monkeys and dogs. Right beside the window were glass-enclosed rat cages.
   Roman pointed to the rats.
   “You’ll notice each cage is labeled with the date and time they were infected. I can think of no better way to illustrate Chimera’s nature.”
   In the Day 1 cage, the six rats appeared healthy, vigorously spinning their exercise wheels.
   In the cage labeled “Day 2,” the first signs of illness appeared.
   Two of the six rats were shivering, their eyes a bright blood-red.
   The other four were huddled in a lethargic heap.
   “The first two days,” said Dr. Roman, “is Chimera’s reproductive phase. You understand, this is completely opposite to what we see on earth. Usually a life-form must reach maturity before it begins to reproduce. Chimera reproduces first, and then begins to mature. It divides at a rapid rate, producing up to a hundred of itself by forty-eight hours. They start out microscopic in size—not visible to the naked eye. Small enough so that you could breathe them in, or absorb them through your mucous membranes, and not even know you’ve been exposed.”
   “So they’re infectious at this early stage in their life cycle?”
   “They’re infectious at any stage of their life cycle. They only have to be released into the air. Usually it happens around the time of the victim’s death, or when the corpse bursts open several days post mortem. Once Chimera’s infected you, once it’s multiplied inside your body, each individual copy begins to grow. Begins to develop into…” He paused. “We don’t really know what to them. Egg sacs, I suppose. Because they contain a larval life-form inside them.” Jack’s gaze moved on, to the Day 3 enclosure. All the mice were twitching, limbs thrashing as though repeatedly jolted by electric shocks.
   “By the third day,” said Roman, “the larvae are growing rapidly. Displacing the victim’s brain matter by sheer mass effect. Wreaking havoc with the host’s neurologic functions. And by day four…”
   They looked at the fourth enclosure. All but one were dead.
   The corpses had not been removed, they lay stiff-legged, mouths gaping open. There were still three cages to go, the process of decomposition had been allowed to continue.
   By day five, the corpses were beginning to bloat.
   On day six, the bellies had grown even larger, the skin stretched drum-taut. viscous fluid seeped from the open eyes and glistened on the nostrils.
   And on day seven … Jack halted beside the window, staring into the seventh enclosure.
   Ruptured corpses littered the bottom like deflated balloons, the skin torn open to reveal a black stew of dissolved organs. And adhering to one rat’s face was a gelatinous mass of opaque globes.
   They were quivering.
   “The egg sacs,” said Roman. “By this stage, the corpse’s body cavities are packed with them. They grow at an astonishing rate, feeding on host tissues. Digesting muscles and organs.” He looked at Jack. “Are you familiar with the life cycle of parasitic wasps?
   Jack shook his head.
   “The adult wasp injects its eggs into a living caterpillar. The larvae grow, ingesting their host’s hemolymph fluid. All this time, caterpillar is alive. Incubating a foreign life-form that’s eating from the inside, until the larvae finally burst out of their dying host.” Roman looked at the dead rats. “These larvae, too, and develop inside a living victim. And that’s what finally kills host. All those larvae, packing into the cranium. Nibbling away the surface of the gray matter. Damaging capillaries, causing intracranial bleeding. The pressure builds. Vessels in the eyes engorge, burst. The host experiences blinding headaches, confusion. He stumbles around as though drunk. In three or four days, he is dead. And still the life-form continues to feed on the corpse. Raiding its DNA. Using that DNA to speed its own evolution.”
   “Into what?” Roman looked at Jack. “We don’t know the end point. With every generation, Chimera acquires DNA from its host. The Chimera we’re working with now is not the same one we started out with. Its genome has become more complex. The life-form more advanced.” More and more human, thought Jack.
   “This is the reason for absolute secrecy,” said Roman. “Any terrorist, any hostile country, could mine the Galapagos Rift for of these things. This organism, in the wrong hands…” His trailed off.
   “So nothing about this thing is manmade.” Roman shook his head. “It was found by chance in the rift. Brought up to the surface by Gabriella. At first Dr. Koenig thought she’d discovered a new species of Archaeons. Instead, what she found was this.” He looked at the wriggling mass of eggs. “A thousand years, they’ve been trapped in the remains of that asteroid. At a depth of nineteen thousand feet. That’s what has kept it in check this time. The fact it came to rest in the deep sea, and not on land.”
   “Now I understand why you tested the hyperbaric chamber.”
   “All this time Chimera has existed benignly in the rift. We thought, if we reproduced those pressures, we could make it benign again.”
   “And can you?”
   Roman shook his head. “Only temporarily. This life-form has been permanently altered by exposure to microgravity. Somehow, when it was brought to ISS, its reproductive switch was turned on. It’s as if it was preprogrammed to be lethal. But it needed the absence of gravity to start that program running again.”
   “How temporary is hyperbaric treatment?”
   “Infected mice stay healthy as long as they’re in the chamber. We’ve kept them alive ten days now. But as soon as we take any of them out, the disease continues its progression.”
   “What about Ranavirus?” Only an hour ago, Dr. Wang from NASA Life Sciences had briefed Jack by phone. At that very moment, a supply of the amphibian virus was winging its way by Air Force jet to Dr. Roman’s lab. “Our scientists believe it could work.”
   “Theoretically. But it’s too early to launch a rescue shuttle. We have to prove Ranavirus works, or you’d risk the lives of another shuttle crew. We need time to test the virus. Several weeks, at least.” Emma doesn’t have weeks, thought Jack. She has only three days’ worth of HCG. In silence he gazed down at the cage of rat corpses. At the eggs, glistening in their nest of slime.
   Time. A thought suddenly occurred to him. The memory of something Roman had just said.
   “You said the hyperbaric chamber has kept mice alive for ten days so far.”
   “That’s correct.”
   “But it was only ten days ago that Discovery crashed.” Roman avoided his gaze.
   “You planned the chamber tests right from the start. Which means you already knew what you were dealing with. Even before you performed the autopsies.” Roman turned and started to walk back to the elevator. He gave a gasp of surprise when Jack caught him by the collar and spun him around.
   “That wasn’t a commercial payload,” said Jack. “Was it?” Roman pushed away and stumbled backward, against the wall.
   “Defense used SeaScience as a cover,” said Jack. “You paid them to send up the experiment for you. To hide the fact that this life-form is of military interest.” Roman sidled toward the elevator. Toward escape.
   Jack grabbed the man’s lab coat and tightened his grip on the collar.
   “This wasn’t bioterrorism. This was your own fucking mistake!”
   Roman’s face had turned purple. “I can’t—can’t breathe!” Jack released him, and Roman slid down the wall, his legs collapsing beneath him. For a moment he didn’t speak, but sat slumped on the floor, struggling to catch his breath. When at last he did talk, all he could manage was a whisper.
   “We had no way of knowing what it would do. How it would change without gravity…”
   “But you knew it was alien.”
   “Yes.”
   “And you knew it was a chimera. That it already had amphibian DNA.
   “No. No, we didn’t know that.”
   “Don’t bullshit me.”
   “We don’t know how the frog DNA got onto the genome! It must have happened in Dr. Koenig’s lab. A mistake of some kind. She was the one who found the organism in the rift, the one who finally realized what it was. SeaScience knew we’d be interested. An extraterrestrial organism—of course we were! Defense paid for their KC-135 experiments. We funded the payload space on ISS. It couldn’t go up as a military payload. There’d be too many questions asked, too many review committees. NASA would wonder why the Army cared about harmless sea microbes. But no one questions the private sector. So it went up as a commercial payload, with SeaScience as sponsor. And Dr. Koenig as principal investigator.
   “Where is Dr. Koenig?”
   Slowly Roman rose to his feet. “She’s dead.”
   That information took Jack by surprise. “How?” he asked.
   “It was an accident.”
   “You think I believe that?”
   “It’s the truth.” Jack studied the man for a moment and decided Roman was not lying.
   “It happened over two weeks ago in Mexico,” said Roman.
   “Just after she resigned from SeaScience. The taxi she was riding was completely destroyed.”
   “And USAMRIID’s raid on her lab? You weren’t there to investigate, were you? You were there to see that all her files were destroyed.”
   “We are talking about an alien life-form. An organism more dangerous than we realized. Yes, the experiment was a mistake, catastrophe. Just imagine what could happen if this information leaked out to the world’s terrorists?” This was why NASA had been kept in the dark. Why the truth could never be revealed.
   “And you haven’t seen the worst of it yet, Dr. McCallum,” said Roman.
   “What do you mean?”
   “There’s one more thing I want to show you.” They rode the elevator down to the next level, to subbasement three. Deeper into Hades, thought Jack. Once again they stepped out to face a wall of glass, and beyond it, another lab with more space-suited workers.
   Roman pressed the intercom button and said, “Could you bring out the specimen?” One of the lab workers nodded. She crossed to a walk-in steel vault, spun the massive combination lock, and disappeared inside.
   When she emerged again, she was wheeling a cart with a steel container on a tray. She rolled it to the viewing window.
   Roman nodded.
   She unlatched the steel container, lifted out a Plexiglas cylinder, and set it on the tray. The contents bobbed gently in a clear bath formalin.
   “We found this burrowed inside the spinal column of Kenichi Hirai,” said Roman. “His spine protected it from the force of when Discovery crashed. When we removed it, it was still alive—but only barely.”
   Jack tried to speak, but could not produce a single word. He heard only the hiss of the ventilation fans and the roar of his own pulse as he stared in horror at the contents of the cylinder.
   “This is what the larvae grow into,” said Roman. “This is the next stage.”
   He understood, now. The reason for secrecy. What he had seen preserved in formalin, coiled up in that Plexiglas cylinder, had explained everything. Though it had been mangled during extraction, its essential features had been apparent. The glossy skin. The larval tail. And the fetal curl of the spine—not amphibian, but something far more horrifying, because its genetic class was recognizable. Mammalian, he thought. Maybe even human. It was already beginning to look like its host.
   Allowed to infect a different species, it would change its appearance yet again. It could raid the DNA of any organism on earth, assume any shape. Eventually it could evolve to the point where it needed no host at all in which to grow and reproduce. It would be independent and self-sufficient. Perhaps even intelligent.
   And Emma was now a living nursery for these things, her body a nourishing cocoon in which they were growing.

   Jack shivered as he stood on the tarmac and stared across the barren airstrip. The Army jeep that had brought him and Gordon back to White Sands Air Force Base had receded to barely a glint now, trailing a fantail of dust into the horizon. The sun’s white-hot brilliance brought tears to his eyes, and for a moment, the shimmered out of focus, as though underwater.
   He turned to look at Gordon. “There’s no other way. We have to do it.”
   “There are a thousand things that can go wrong.”
   “There always are. That’s true for every launch, every mission. Why should this one be any different?”
   “There’ll be no contingencies. No safety backups. I know what we’re dealing with, and it’s a cowboy operation.”
   “Which makes it possible. What’s their motto? Smaller, faster, cheaper.”
   “Okay,” said Gordon, “let’s say you don’t blow up on the launchpad. Say the Air Force doesn’t blast you out of the sky. When you get up there, you’re still faced with the biggest gamble of all, whether the Ranavirus will work.”
   “From the very beginning, Gordon, there was one thing I couldn’t figure out, Why was amphibian DNA on that genome? How did Chimera get frog genes? Roman thinks it was an accident. A mistake that happened in Koenig’s lab.” Jack shook his head. “I don’t think it was an accident at all. I think Koenig put those there. As a fail-safe.”
   “I don’t understand.”
   “Maybe she was thinking ahead, to the possible dangers. To what could happen if this new life-form changed while in microgravity. If Chimera ever got out of control, she wanted a way to it. A back door through its defenses. And this is it.”
   “A frog virus.”
   “It will work, Gordon. It has to work. I’ll bet my life on it.”
   A whorl of dust spun between them, kicking up sand and stray scraps of paper. Gordon turned and gazed across the tarmac at the T-38 they had flown from Houston. And he sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.”