Gravity: A Novel of Medical Suspense

by Tess Gerritsen

  “Then you’d better get moving or you’ll miss the plane.”

  “Wait. Who’s the patient? Which one’s sick?”

  “They all are,” said Cutler. “The entire crew.”

  THIRTEEN

  Infectious precautions. Emergency deorbit. What are we dealing with?

  The wind was blowing, kicking up dust as Jack trotted across the tarmac toward the waiting jet. Squinting against flying grit, he climbed the steps and ducked into the aircraft. It was a Gulfstream IV seating fifteen passengers, one of a fleet of sturdy and reliable workhorses that NASA used to shuttle personnel between its many far-flung centers of operation. There were already a dozen people aboard, including a number of nurses and doctors from the Flight Medicine Clinic. Several of them gave Jack waves of greeting.

  “We’ve got to get going, sir,” said the copilot. “So if you could buckle right in.”

  Jack took a window seat near the front of the plane.

  Roy Bloomfeld was the last to step aboard, his bright red hair stiff from the wind. As soon as Bloomfeld took his seat, the copilot closed the hatch.

  “Todd isn’t coming?” asked Jack.

  “He’s manning the console for landing. Looks like we’re gonna be the shock troops.”

  The plane began to taxi out onto the runway. They could waste no time; it was an hour-and-a-half flight to White Sands.

  “You know what’s going on?” Jack asked. “Cause I’m in the dark.”

  “I got a brief rundown. You know that spill they had on Discovery yesterday? The one they’ve been trying to identify? Turns out it was fluids leaking from Kenichi Hirai’s body bag.”

  “That bag was sealed tight. How did it leak?”

  “Tear in the plastic. The crew says the contents seem to be under pressure. Some sort of advanced decomposition going on.”

  “Kittredge described the fluid as green and only mildly fishy smelling. That hardly sounds like fluid from a decomposing corpse.”

  “We’re all puzzled. The bag’s been resealed. We’ll have to wait till they land to find out what’s going on inside. It’s the first time we’ve dealt with human remains in microgravity. Maybe there’s something different about the process of decomposition. Maybe the anaerobic bacteria die off, and that’s why it’s not giving off foul odors.”

  “How sick is the crew?”

  “Both Hewitt and Kittredge are complaining of severe headaches. Mercer’s throwing up like a dog now, and O’Leary’s got abdominal pain. We’re not sure how much of it is psychological. There’s gotta be an emotional reaction when you’ve been gulping in a decomposing colleague.”

  Psychological factors certainly complicated the picture. Whenever there is an outbreak of food poisoning, a significant percentage of victims are, in fact, uninfected. The power of suggestion is so strong it can produce vomiting as severe as any real illness.

  “They had to put off the undocking. White Sands has been having problems too—one of their TACANs was transmitting erroneous signals. They needed a few hours to get it up and functioning again.”

  The TACAN, or tactical air navigation locating system, was a series of ground transmitters that provided the orbiter with updates on its navigation-state vector. A bad TACAN signal could cause the shuttle to miss the runway entirely.

  “Now they’ve decided they can’t wait,” said Bloomfeld. “In just the last hour, the crew’s gotten sicker. Kittredge and Hewitt both have scleral hemorrhages. That’s how it started with Hirai.”

  Their plane began its takeoff roll. The roar of the engines filled their ears, and the ground dropped away.

  Jack yelled over the noise, “What about ISS? Is anyone sick on the station?”

  “No. They kept the hatches closed between vehicles to contain the spill.”

  “So it’s confined to Discovery?”

  “So far as we know.”

  Then Emma’s okay, he thought, releasing a deep breath. Emma’s safe. But if a contagion had been brought aboard Discovery inside Hirai’s corpse, why wasn’t the space station crew infected as well?

  “What’s the shuttle’s ETA?” he asked.

  “They’re undocking now. Burn target’s in forty-five minutes, and touchdown should be around seventeen hundred.”

  Which didn’t give the ground crew much time to prepare. He stared out the window as they broke through the clouds into a golden bath of sunlight. Everything is working against us, he thought. An emergency landing. A broken TACAN shack. A sick crew.

  And it will all come together on a runway in the middle of nowhere.

  Jill Hewitt’s head hurt, and her eyeballs were aching so badly she could barely focus on the undocking checklist. In just the last hour pain had crept into every muscle of her body, and now it felt as if jagged bolts were ripping through her back, her thighs. Both her sclerae had turned red; so had Kittredge’s. His eyeballs looked like twin bags of blood. Glowing. Red. He was in pain too; she could see it in the way he moved, the slow and guarded turning of his head. They were both in agony, yet neither of them dared accept an injection of narcotics. Undocking and landing required peak alertness, and they could not risk losing even the slightest edge of performance.

  Get us home. Get us home. That was the mantra that kept running through Jill’s head as she struggled to stay on task, as sweat drenched her shirt and the pain ate into her concentration.

  They were racing through the departure checklist. She had plugged the IBM ThinkPad’s computer cable into the aft console data port, booted up, and opened the Rendezvous and Proximity Operations program.

  “There’s no data flow,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The port must be gunked up by the spill. I’ll try the middeck PCMMU.” She unplugged the cable. Every bone in her face screamed with pain as she made her way through the interdeck access, carrying the ThinkPad. Her eyes were throbbing so badly they felt as if they were about to pop out of their sockets. Down on middeck, she saw Mercer was already dressed in his launch-and-entry suit and strapped in for reentry. He was unconscious—probably from the dose of narcotics. O’Leary, also strapped in, was still awake but looking dazed. Jill floated across to the middeck data port and plugged in the ThinkPad.

  Still no data stream.

  “Shit. Shit.”

  Now struggling to focus, she made her way back to the flight deck.

  “No luck?” said Kittredge.

  “I’ll change out the source cable and try this port again.” Her head was pounding so badly now it brought tears to her eyes. Teeth gritted, she pulled out the cable, replaced it with a new one. Rebooted. From Windows, she opened RPOP.

  The Rendezvous and Proximity Operations logo appeared on the screen.

  Sweat broke out on her upper lip as she began to type in the mission elapsed time. Days, hours, minutes, seconds. Her fingers weren’t obeying as they should. They were sluggish, clumsy. She had to back up to correct the numbers. At last she selected “Prox Ops” and clicked on “OK.”

  “RPOP initialized,” she said with relief. “Ready to process data.”

  Kittredge said, “Capcom, are we go for sep?”

  “Stand by, Discovery.”

  The wait was excruciating. Jill looked down at her hand and saw that her fingers had started to twitch, that the muscles of her forearm were contracting like a dozen writhing worms beneath the skin. As if something alive were tunneling through her flesh. She fought to keep her hand steady, but her fingers kept twitching in electric spasms. Get us home now. While we can still fly this bird.

  “Discovery,” said Capcom. “You are a go for undocking.”

  “Roger that. Digital autopilot on low Z. Go for undocking.” Kittredge shot Jill a look of profound relief. “Now let’s get the hell home,” he muttered, and grasped the hand controls.

  Flight Director Randy Carpenter stood like the statue of Colossus, his gaze fixed on the front screen, his engineer’s brain coolly monitoring simultaneous streams of visual data and lo
op conversations. As always, Carpenter was thinking several steps ahead. The docking base was now depressurized. The latches connecting the orbiter to ISS would unhook, and preloaded springs in the docking system would gently push the two vehicles apart, causing them to free drift away from each other. Only when they were two feet apart would Discovery’s RCS jets be turned on to steer the orbiter away. At any point in this delicate sequence of events, things could go wrong, but for every possible failure, Carpenter had a contingency plan. If the docking latches failed to unhook, they’d fire pyrotechnic charges and shear off the latch retention bolts. If that failed, two crew members from ISS could perform an EVA and manually remove the bolts. They had backup plans for backup plans, a contingency for every failure.

  At least, every failure they could predict. What Carpenter dreaded was the glitch that no one had thought about. And now he asked himself the same question he always did at the beginning of a new mission phase: What have we failed to anticipate?

  “ODS has successfully disengaged,” he heard Kittredge announce. “Latches have released. We’re now in free drift.”

  The flight controller beside Carpenter gave a little punch of triumph in the air.

  Carpenter thought ahead, to the landing. The weather at White Sands was holding steady, head winds at fifteen knots. The TACAN would be up and operational in time for the shuttle’s arrival. Ground crews were at this moment converging on the runway. There were no new glitches in sight, yet he knew one had to be waiting just around the corner.

  All this was going through his mind, but not a flicker of expression crossed his face. Not a hint to any of the flight controllers in the room that he was feeling dread, as sour as bile, in his throat.

  Aboard ISS, Emma and her crewmates also watched and waited. All research activities were at a temporary standstill. They had gathered at the Node 1 cupola to look at the massive shuttle as it undocked. Griggs was also monitoring the operation on an IBM ThinkPad, which showed the same RPOP wireframe display that Houston’s Mission Control was now looking at.

  Through the cupola windows, Emma saw Discovery begin to inch away, and she gave a sigh of relief. The orbiter was now in free drift, and on its way home.

  Medical Officer O’Leary floated in a narcotic daze. He’d injected fifty milligrams of Demerol into his own arm, just enough to take the edge off his pain, to allow him to strap in Mercer, to prepare the cabin for reentry. Even that small dose of narcotic was clouding his mental processes.

  He sat strapped in his middeck seat, ready for deorbit. The cabin seemed to drift in and out of focus, as though he were seeing it underwater. The light hurt his eyes, and he closed them. Moments ago, he thought he’d seen Jill Hewitt float past with the ThinkPad; now she was gone, but he could hear her strained voice over his headset, along with Kittredge’s and Capcom’s. They had undocked.

  Even in his mental fog, he felt a sense of impotence, of shame, that he was strapped into his seat like an invalid while his crewmates up on flight deck were laboring to get them home. Pride made him fight his way back from the comfortable oblivion of sleep, and he surfaced into the hard glare of the middeck lights. He felt for his harness release, and as the straps came free, he floated out of his seat. The middeck began to shift around him, and he had to close his eyes to stem the sudden tide of nausea. Fight it, he thought. Mind over matter. I’m the one who always had the iron stomach. But he could not bring himself to open his eyes, to confront that disorienting drift of the room.

  Until he heard the sound. It was a creaking, so close by that he thought it must be Mercer, stirring in his sleep. O’Leary turned toward the sound—and found that he was not facing Mercer. He was staring at Kenichi Hirai’s body bag.

  It was bulging. Expanding.

  My eyes, he thought. They’re playing tricks on me.

  He blinked and refocused. The shroud was still swollen, the plastic ballooning out over the corpse’s abdomen. Hours ago, they had patched the leak; now the pressure inside must be building up again.

  Moving through a dreamlike haze, he floated across to the sleeping pallet. He placed his hand on the bulging body bag.

  And jerked away in horror. For in that brief moment of contact, he had felt it swell, retract, and swell again.

  The corpse was pulsating.

  Sweat beading her upper lip, Jill Hewitt watched through the overhead window as Discovery unlatched from ISS. Slowly the gap widened between them, and she glanced at the data streaming across her computer screen. One foot separation. Two feet. Going home. Pain suddenly arced through her head, its stab so unbearable she felt herself beginning to black out. She fought back, holding on to consciousness with the stubbornness of a bulldog.

  “ODS is clear,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Kittredge responded with, “Switching to RCS OP, low Z.”

  Using the reaction-control-system thrusters, Kittredge would now gently steer away from ISS, moving to a point three thousand feet below the station, where their differing orbits would automatically begin to pull them farther apart.

  Jill heard the whomp of the thrusters firing and felt the orbiter shudder as Kittredge, at the aft controls, slowly backed them down the R-bar. His hand shook, and his face went tight with the effort to retain control of his grip. He, not the computer, was flying the orbiter, and a wayward jerk of the control stick could send them careening off course.

  Five feet apart. Ten. They were past the crucial separation phase now, moving farther and farther away from the station.

  Jill began to relax.

  And then she heard the shriek on middeck. A cry of horror and disbelief. O’Leary.

  She turned, just as a gruesome fountain of human debris burst onto the flight deck and exploded toward her.

  Kittredge, nearest the interdeck access, caught the brunt of the force and went flying against the rotational hand controller. Jill tumbled backward, her headset flying off, her body pummelled by foul-smelling fragments of intestine and skin and clumps of black hair, still attached to scalp. Kenichi’s hair. She heard the whomps of firing thrusters, and the orbiter seemed to lurch around her. The cloud of disintegrated human parts had spread throughout the flight deck, and a nightmarish galaxy swirled, floating bits of plastic shroud and shattered organs and those strange greenish clumps. A grapelike mass of them floated by and splattered against a nearby wall.

  When droplets collide with, and adhere to, flat surfaces in microgravity, they tremble briefly from the impact, then fall still. This splatter had not stopped moving.

  In disbelief, she watched as the quivering intensified, as a ripple disturbed the surface. Only then did she see, embedded deep within the gelatinous mass, a core of something black, something moving. It writhed like the larva of a mosquito.

  Suddenly a new image caught her eye, even more startling. She stared up through the window above the flight deck and saw the space station rapidly zooming toward them, so close now she could almost make out the rivets on the solar array truss.

  In a burst of panic, she shoved against the wall and dove through that gruesome cloud of exploded flesh, her arms outstretched in desperation toward the orbiter control stick.

  “Collision course!” yelled Griggs over space-to-space radio. “Discovery, you are on a collision course!”

  There was no response.

  “Discovery! Reverse course!”

  Emma watched in horror as disaster hurtled toward them. Through the space station’s cupola window, she saw the orbiter simultaneously pitch up and roll to starboard. She saw Discovery’s delta wing slicing toward them with enough momentum to ram it through the station’s aluminum hull. She saw, in the imminent collision, the approach of her own death.

  The plumes of firing rockets suddenly spewed out from the forward RCS thruster in the orbiter’s nose. Discovery began to pitch downward, reversing momentum. Simultaneously the starboard delta wing rolled upward, but not quickly enough to clear the space station’s main solar truss. She felt her heart-
beat freeze.

  Heard Luther whisper, “Lord Jesus.”

  “CRV!” Griggs shouted in panic. “Everyone to the evac vehicle!”

  Arms and legs churned in midair, feet flying in every direction as the crew scrambled to evacuate the node. Nicolai and Luther were first through the hatch, into the hab. Emma had just grabbed the hatch handhold when her ears filled with the squeal of rending metal, the groan of aluminum being twisted and deformed by the collision of two massive objects.

  The space station shuddered, and in the ensuing quake, she caught a disorienting glimpse of the node walls tilting away, of Griggs’s ThinkPad spinning in midair and Diana’s terrified face, slick with sweat.

  The lights flickered and went out. In the darkness, a red warning light flashed on and off, on and off.

  A siren shrieked.

  FOURTEEN

  Shuttle flight director Randy Carpenter was watching death on the front screen.

  At the instant of the orbiter’s impact, he felt the blow as surely as if a fist had been rammed into his own sternum, and he actually lifted his hand and pressed it to his chest.

  For a few seconds, the Flight Control Room went absolutely silent. Stunned faces stared at the front wall. On the center screen was the world map with the shuttle trajectory trace. To the right was the frozen RPOP display, Discovery and ISS represented by wire-frame diagrams. The orbiter was now melded like a crumpled toy to the silhouette of ISS. Carpenter felt his lungs suddenly expand, realized that, in his horror, he had forgotten to breathe.

  The FCR erupted in chaos.

  “Flight, we have no voice downlink,” he heard Capcom say. “Discovery is not responding.”

  “Flight, we’re still getting data stream from TCS—”

  “Flight, no drop in orbiter cabin pressure. No indication of oxygen leak—”

  “What about ISS?” Carpenter snapped. “Do we have downlink from them?”

  “SVO’s trying to hail them. The station pressure is dropping—”

  “How low?”