Gravity

by Tess Gerritsen

  “Tell me more about Apogee,” Profitt cut in.

  Gregorian gave a dismissive snort. “A minor player. Twelve-man engineering firm out in Nevada. They haven’t had a lot of luck. A year and a half ago, they blew up their first prototype twenty seconds into launch, and all their early investors vanished. I’m sort of surprised they’re still hanging in there. Their booster’s based on Russian technology. The orbiter’s a simple, bare-bones system with a parachute reentry. Payload capacity’s only three hundred kilos, plus a pilot.”

  “I’ll fly out to Nevada at once. We need to get a better handle on this.”

  “Sir, we can monitor every move this vehicle makes. Right now, we have no reason to take action. They’re just a small firm, trying to impress some new investors. If the orbiter presents any real concern, we can have our ground-based interceptors standing by to bring that bird down.”

  General Gregorian was probably right. The fact that some hotshot ground jockeys decided to launch a monkey into space did not constitute a national emergency. He had to move very carefully on this. The death of Luther Ames had unleashed a national uproar of protest. This was not the time to shoot down another spacecraft—one built by a private American firm, no less.

  But so much about this Apogee launch disturbed him. The timing. The rendezvous maneuvers. The fact they could neither confirm nor rule out a human presence.

  What else could it be but a rescue mission?

  He said, “I’m leaving for Nevada.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Profitt was in his car and pulling out of the driveway. The night was clear, the stars like bright pinpricks in blue velvet. There were perhaps one hundred billion galaxies in the universe, and each galaxy contained a hundred billion stars. How many of those stars had planets, and how many planets had life? Panspermia, the theory that life exists and is distributed throughout the universe, was no longer merely speculation. The belief that there was life only on this pale blue dot, in this insignificant solar system, now seemed as absurd as the ancients’ naive belief that the sun and the stars revolved around the earth. The only strict requirements for life were the presence of carbon-based compounds plus some form of water. Both were in abundance throughout the universe. Which meant that life, however primitive, could be abundant as well, and that interstellar dust might be seeded with bacteria or spores. From such primitive creatures did all other life spring.

  And what happened if such life-forms, arriving as bits of cosmic dust, seeded a planet where life already existed?

  This was Jared Profitt’s nightmare.

  Once, he had thought the stars beautiful. Once he had viewed the universe with awe and wonder. Now, when he looked at the night sky, he saw infinite menace. He saw biological Armageddon.

  Their conqueror, descending from the heavens.

  It was time to die.

  Emma’s hands were shaking, and the pounding in her head was so severe she had to grit her teeth just to keep herself from crying out. The last morphine shot had barely taken the edge off the pain, and she was so dazed by the narcotic she could barely focus on the computer screen. On the keyboard beneath her fingers. She paused to still the trembling of her hands. Then she began to type.

  Personal E-mail to: Jack McCallum

  If I could have one wish, it would be to hear your voice again. I don’t know where you are, or why I can’t speak to you. I only know that this thing inside me is about to claim victory. Even as I write this, I can feel it gaining ground. I can feel my strength retreating. I have fought it as long as I can. But I’m tired now. I’m ready to sleep.

  While I can type these words, this is what I most want to say. I love you. I have never stopped loving you. They say that no one who stands poised at the doorway to eternity steps through it with a lie on his lips. They say that deathbed confessions are always to be believed. And this is mine.

  Her hands were shaking so badly she could not type any more. She signed off and pressed “send.”

  In the medical kit, she found the supply of Valium. There were two tablets left. She swallowed them both with a gulp of water. The edges of her vision were starting to black out. Her legs felt numb, as though they were not part of her body at all, but the limbs of a stranger.

  There was not much time left.

  She did not have the strength to don an EVA suit. And what did it matter now where she died? The station was already diseased. Her corpse would be just one more item to clean up.

  She made her last passage into the dark side of the station.

  The cupola was where she wanted to spend her final waking moments. Floating in darkness, gazing down at the beauty of the earth. From the windows, she could see the blue-gray arc of the Caspian Sea. Clouds swirling over Kazakhstan and snow in the Himalayas. Down there are billions of people going about their lives, she thought. And here am I, a dying speck in the heavens.

  “Emma?” It was Todd Cutler, speaking gently over her comm unit. “How are you doing?”

  “Not…feeling so good,” she murmured. “Pain. Vision’s starting to fade. I took the last Valium.”

  “You have to hang in there, Emma. Listen to me. Don’t give up. Not yet.”

  “I’ve already lost the battle, Todd.”

  “No, you haven’t! You have to have faith—”

  “In miracles?” She gave a soft laugh. “The real miracle is that I am up here at all. That I’m seeing the earth from a place so few people have ever been . . .” She touched the window of the cupola and felt the warmth of the sun through the glass. “I only wish I could speak to Jack.”

  “We’re trying to make that happen.”

  “Where is he? Why can’t you reach him?”

  “He’s working like crazy to get you home. You have to believe that.”

  She blinked away tears. I do.

  “Is there anything we can do for you?” said Todd. “Anyone else you want to speak to?”

  “No.” She sighed. “Only Jack.”

  There was a silence.

  “I think—I think what I want most now—”

  “Yes?” said Todd.

  “I’d like to go to sleep. That’s all. Just go to sleep.”

  He cleared his throat. “Of course. You get some rest. I’ll be right here if you need me.” He closed with a soft, “Good night, ISS.”

  Good night, Houston, she thought. And she took off her headset and let it float away into the gloom.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The convoy of black sedans braked to a stop in front of Apogee Engineering, tires churning up a massive cloud of dust. Jared Profitt stepped out of the lead car and gazed up at the building. It looked like an airplane hangar, windowless and bleakly industrial, its rooftop studded with satellite equipment.

  He nodded to General Gregorian. “Secure the building.”

  Barely a minute later, Gregorian’s men gave the all-secure signal, and Profitt stepped into the building.

  Inside, he found a ragtag group of men and women herded into a tense and angry circle. He immediately recognized two of the faces: Director of Flight Crew Operations Gordon Obie and shuttle Flight Director Randy Carpenter. So NASA was here, as he’d suspected, and this featureless building in the middle of the Nevada desert had been turned into a rebel Mission Control.

  Unlike the Flight Control Room at NASA, this was clearly a shoestring operation. The floor was bare concrete. Spaghetti tangles of wires and cables were strung everywhere. A grotesquely overweight cat picked its way among a pile of discarded electronic equipment.

  Profitt walked over to the flight consoles and saw the data streaming in. “What’s the orbiter’s status?” he asked.

  One of Gregorian’s men, a flight controller from U.S. Space Command, said, “It’s already completed its Ti-burn, sir, and it’s now moving up the R-bar. It could rendezvous with ISS within forty-five minutes.”

  “Halt the approach.”

  “No!” said Gordon Obie. He broke away from the group and stepped forward. “Don’
t do this. You don’t understand—”

  “There can be no evacuation of station crew,” said Profitt.

  “It’s not an evacuation!”

  “Then what’s it doing up there? It’s clearly about to rendezvous with ISS.”

  “No, it’s not. It can’t. It has no docking system, no way of connecting with the station. There’s no chance of cross-contamination.”

  “You haven’t answered my question, Mr. Obie. What is Apogee II doing up there?”

  Gordon hesitated. “It’s going through a near-approach sequence, that’s all. It’s a test of Apogee’s rendezvous capabilities.”

  “Sir,” said the flight controller from Space Command. “I’m seeing a major anomaly here.”

  Profitt’s gaze shot back to the console. “What anomaly?”

  “The cabin atmospheric pressure. It’s down to eight psi. It should be at fourteen point seven. Either the orbiter has a serious air leak, or they’ve purposely allowed it to depressurize.”

  “How long has it been that low?”

  Quickly the flight controller typed on the keyboard, and a graph appeared, a plot of the cabin pressure over time. “According to their computers, the cabin was maintained at fourteen point seven for the first twelve hours after launch. Then around thirty-six hours ago, it was depressurized to ten point two, where it held steady until an hour ago.” Suddenly his chin jerked up. “Sir, I know what they’re doing! This appears to be a prebreathe protocol.”

  “Protocol for what?”

  “An EVA. A spacewalk.” He looked at Profitt. “I think someone’s aboard that orbiter.”

  Profitt turned to face Gordon Obie. “Who’s aboard? Who did you send up?”

  Gordon could see there was no longer any point in holding back the truth. He said, in quiet defeat, “It’s Jack McCallum.”

  Emma Watson’s husband.

  “So it’s a rescue mission,” said Profitt. “How was it supposed to work? He goes EVA, and then what?”

  “The SAFER jet pack. The Orlan-M suit he’s wearing is equipped with one. He uses it to propel himself from Apogee II to the station. Enters via the ISS airlock.”

  “And he retrieves his wife and brings her home.”

  “No. That wasn’t the plan. Look, he understands—we all understand—why she can’t come home. The reason Jack went up was to deliver the Ranavirus.”

  “And if the virus doesn’t work?”

  “That’s the gamble.”

  “He’s exposing himself to ISS. We’d never let him come home.”

  “He wasn’t planning to come home! The orbiter was going to return without him.” Gordon paused, his gaze fixed on Profitt’s. “It’s a one-way trip, and Jack knows it. He accepted the conditions. It’s his wife dying up there! He won’t—he can’t—let her die alone.”

  Stunned, Profitt fell silent. He looked at the flight console, the monitors streaming with data. As the seconds ticked by, he thought of his own wife, Amy, dying in Bethesda Hospital. Remembered his frantic sprint through the Denver airport to catch the next flight home to her, and remembered his despair as he’d arrived breathless at the gate to see the plane pulling away. He thought of the desperation that must be driving McCallum, the anguish of being so heartbreakingly close to his goal, only to see it drift inexorably out of reach. And he thought, This will bring no harm to anyone here on earth. To anyone but McCallum. He has made his choice, with full knowledge of the consequences. What right do I have to stop him?

  He said, to the Space Command flight controller, “Return control of the console to Apogee. Let them resume their mission.”

  “Sir?”

  “I said, let the orbiter continue its approach.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence. Then the Apogee controllers scrambled back into their seats.

  “Mr. Obie,” said Profitt, turning to look at Gordon. “You do understand that we’ll be monitoring every move McCallum makes. I am not your enemy. But I’m charged with protecting the greater good, and I’ll do what’s necessary. If I see any indication you plan to bring either of those people home, I will order Apogee II destroyed.”

  Gordon Obie nodded. “It’s what I’d expect you to do.”

  “Then we both know where we stand.” Profitt took a deep breath and turned to face the row of consoles. “Now. Go ahead and get that man to his wife.”

  Jack hung poised at the edge of eternity.

  No amount of EVA training in the WET-F pool could have prepared him for this visceral punch of fear, for the paralysis that now seized him as he stared into the emptiness of space. He had swung open the hatch leading into the open payload bay, and his first view, through the bay’s gaping clamshell doors, was of the earth, a dizzying drop below. He could not see ISS; she was floating above him, out of view. To reach her, he would have to swim down past those payload doors and circle around to the opposite side of Apogee II. But first, he had to force himself to ignore every instinct that was now screaming at him to retreat back into the air lock.

  “Emma,” he said, and the sound of her name was like a murmured prayer. He took a breath and prepared to release his grip on the hatchway, to surrender himself to the heavens.

  “Apogee II, this is Capcom Houston. Apogee— Jack— please respond.”

  The transmission over his comm unit caught Jack by surprise. He had not expected any contact from the ground. The fact Houston was openly hailing him by name meant all secrecy had been shattered.

  “Apogee, we urgently request you respond.”

  He remained silent, uncertain if he should confirm his presence in orbit.

  “Jack, we have been advised that the White House will not interfere with your mission. Provided you understand one essential fact: This is a one-way trip.” Capcom paused and then said quietly, “If you board ISS, you can’t leave it again. You can’t come home.”

  “This is Apogee II,” Jack finally answered. “Message received and understood.”

  “And you still plan to proceed? Think about it.”

  “What the hell do you think I came up here for? The fucking view?”

  “Uh, we roger that. But before you proceed, you should be aware of this. We lost contact with ISS about six hours ago.”

  “What do you mean, ‘lost contact’?”

  “Emma is no longer responding.”

  Six hours, he thought. What has happened in the last six hours? The launch had been two days ago. It had taken that long for Apogee II to catch up with ISS and complete the rendezvous maneuvers. In all that time, he’d been cut off from all communication, from any knowledge of what was happening aboard the station.

  “You may already be too late. You might want to reconsider—”

  “What does biotelemetry show?” he cut in. “What’s her rhythm?”

  “She’s not hooked up. She chose to disconnect her leads.”

  “Then you don’t know. You can’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “Just before she went silent, she sent you a final E-mail.” Capcom added gently, “Jack, she was saying good-bye.”

  No. At once he released his grip on the hatchway and pushed out of the air lock, diving headfirst into the open payload bay. No. He grabbed a handhold and scrambled up over the clamshell door, to the other side of Apogee II. Suddenly the space station was right there, looming above him, so big and sprawling he was momentarily stunned by the wonder of it. Then, in panic, he thought, Where is the air lock? I don’t see the air lock! There were so many modules, so many solar arrays, fanned out across an area as large as two football fields. He could not orient himself. He was lost, overwhelmed by the dizzying spread.

  Then he spotted the dark-green Soyuz capsule jutting out. He was underneath the Russian end of the station. Instantly everything snapped into place. His gaze shot to the American end, and he identified the U.S. hab. At the upper end of the hab was Node 1, which led to the air lock.

  He knew where he was going.

  Here came the leap of faith. With
only his SAFER jet pack to propel him, he would be crossing empty space without tethers, without anything to anchor him. He activated the jet pack, pushed off from Apogee, and launched himself toward ISS.

  It was his first EVA, and he was clumsy and inexperienced, unable to judge how quickly he was closing in on his goal. He slammed into the hab hull with such force he almost caromed off, and barely managed to grab onto a handhold.

  Hurry. She is dying.

  Sick with dread, he clambered up the length of the hab, his breaths coming hard and fast.

  “Houston,” he panted. “I need Surgeon—have him standing by—”

  “Roger that.”

  “Almost—I’m almost to Node One—”

  “Jack, this is Surgeon.” It was Todd Cutler’s voice, speaking with quiet urgency. “You’ve been out of the loop for two days. You need to know a few things. Emma’s last dose of HCG was fifty-five hours ago. Since then, her labs have deteriorated. Amylase and CPK sky-high. Last transmission, she was complaining of headaches and visual loss. That was six hours ago. We don’t know her current condition.”

  “I’m at the air-lock hatch!”

  “Station control software has been switched to EVA mode. You’re a go for repress.”

  Jack swung open the hatch and pulled himself into the crew lock. As he twisted around to close the external hatch, he caught a glimpse of Apogee II. She was already moving away. His only lifeboat was going home without him. He’d passed the point of no return.

  He closed and sealed the hatch. “Pressure-equalization valve open,” he said. “Beginning repress.”

  “I’m trying to prepare you for the worst,” said Todd. “In case she—”

  “Tell me something useful!”

  “Okay. Okay, here’s the latest from USAMRIID. The Ranavirus does seem to work on their lab animals. But it’s only been effective in early cases. If it’s given during the first thirty-six hours after infection.”

  “What if it’s given after that?”

  Cutler didn’t respond. His silence confirmed the worst.

  The crew lock pressure was up to fourteen psi. Jack opened the middle hatch and dove into the equipment lock. Frantically he detached his gloves, then doffed his Orlan-M suit and wriggled out of the cooling garment. From the Orlan’s zippered pockets he pulled out various packets containing emergency medications and prefilled syringes of Ranavirus. By now he was shaking with fear, terrified of what he would find inside the station. He swung open the inner hatch.