Gravity

by Tess Gerritsen

  August 15

  “I say fuck’em,” said Luther. The air-to-ground comm was off, their conversation unmonitored by Mission Control. “Let’s get back on the CRV, flip the switches, and go. They can’t make us turn around 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 sometimes 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, his 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 populated area, it was the duty of these range-safety officers to press the destruct buttons. They had met every member of the shuttle’s flight crew. They had probably seen photographs of the astronauts’ families. They knew exactly who they would be killing. It was a terrible 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 breathed 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 say 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 the 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 half 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 chimera had 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, had 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 the 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 her fingers closed over it, the corpse suddenly scrabbled to life. Emma 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 his hips were lurching, thrusting off the board as the seizures continued their inexorable march across his body. The jerking intensified, the wrist restraints scraping his skin bloody. Emma heard a sickening crack as the bones of his left forearm snapped. The right wrist restraint flew 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 past 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 with ISS 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 just 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 body 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 uses 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 does it kill, it reproduces. It spreads.” She paused. And the sound of 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 voice 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 marine 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. She 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.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “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, was the reason cultures were grown in orbit. On earth, tissue grows flat like a sheet, covering the surface of the culture plate. In space, the 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 ear
th 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 wet trash, which is what they’d normally do with a nonhazardous organism. No, Koenig told them to put the cultures in the crucible 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 are 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 the 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 even 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 the payload? I find it interesting that Helen Koenig vanished just as this crisis was heating up.”