Gravity. Part 35

"I'm still a go."

"Then this will be our last voice contact. There can't be any communication from you. No downlink to the ground, no contact with ISS, or everything's blown. The instant we hear your voice, we'll abort the whole mission and bring you back." still can, was what he didn't add.

"I roger that." There was a silence. "You don't have to do this. No one expects you to."

"Let's get on with it. Just light the d.a.m.n candle, okay?" Gordon's answering sigh came through loud and clear. "Okay. You're a go. We're at T minus three minutes and counting."

"Thank you, Gordie. For everything."

"Good luck and G.o.dspeed, Jack McCallum." The hard link was severed. And that may be the last voice I'll ever hear, thought Jack. From this point on, the only uplink from Apogee ground control would be command data streaming into the onboard guidance and nav computers. The vehicle was flying itself, Jack was nothing than the dumb monkey in the pilot's seat.

He closed his eyes and focused on the beating of his own heart.

It had slowed. He now felt strangely calm and prepared for the inevitable, whatever that might be. He heard the whirs and clicks the onboard systems preparing for the leap. He imagined the cloudless sky, its atmosphere dense as water, like a sea of air which he must surface to reach the cold, clear vacuum of s.p.a.ce.

Where Emma was dying.

The crowd in the viewing stand had fallen ominously silent. The countdown clock, displayed on the closed-circuit video feed, slid past the T minus sixty seconds mark and kept ticking. They're going for the launch window, thought Casper, and the fresh sweat of panic bloomed on his forehead. In his heart, he had never believed it would come to this moment. He had expected delays, aborts, even a cancellation. He had lived through so many disappointments, so much bad luck with this d.a.m.n bird, that dread like bile in his throat. He glanced at the faces in the stands and that many of them were mouthing the seconds as they ticked by. It started as a whisper, a rhythmic disturbance in the air.

"Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-sevena" The whispers became a chorus of murmurs, growing louder with each pa.s.sing second.

"Twelve. Eleven. Tena" Casper's hands were shaking so hard he had to clutch the railing.

His pulse throbbed in his fingertips.

"Seven. six. Fivea" He closed his eyes. Oh, G.o.d, what had they done?

"Three. Two. Onea" The crowd sucked in a simultaneous gasp of wonder. Then the roar of the boosters spilled over him, and his eyes flew open. He stared at the sky, at the streak of fire lifting toward the heavens. Any second now it would happen. First the blinding flash, then, behind at the speed of sound, the pulse of the explosion battering their eardrums. That's how it had happened with Apogee I. But the fiery streak kept on rising until it was only a pale dot punched in the deep blue sky.

A hand clapped his back, hard. He gave a start and turned to see Mark Lucas beaming at him.

"Way to go, Mulholland! What a gorgeous launch!" Casper ventured another terrified glance at the sky. Still no explosion.

"But I guess you never had any doubts, did you?" said Lucas.

Casper swallowed. "None at all." The last dose.

Emma squeezed the plunger, slowly emptying the contents of the syringe into her vein. She removed the needle, pressed gauze the puncture site, and folded her arm to hold it in place while she disposed of the needle. It felt like a sacred ceremony, every performed with reverence, with the solemn knowledge that this was the last time she would experience each sensation, from the p.r.i.c.k of the needle, to the hard lump of gauze pressing into the flesh at the crook of her arm. And how long would this final dose of HCG keep her alive?

She turned and looked at the mouse cage, which she had moved into the Russian service module, where there was more light. The lone female was now curled in a s.h.i.+vering ball, dying.

The hormone's effect was not permanent. The babies had died that morning. By tomorrow, thought Emma, I will be the only one alive aboard this station.

No, not the only one. There would be the life-form inside her.

The scores of larvae that would soon awaken from dormancy and begin to feed and grow.

She pressed her hand to her abdomen, like a pregnant woman sensing the fetus inside her. And like a real fetus, the life-form now harbored would carry bits and pieces of her DNA. In that way, it was her biological offspring, and it possessed the genetic of every host it had ever known. Kenichi Hirai. Nicolai Rudenko.

Diana Estes. And now, Emma.

She would be the last. There would be no new hosts, no new victims, because there would be no rescuers. The station was now a sepulcher of contagion, as forbidden and untouchable as a leper colony had been to the ancients.

She floated out of the RSM and swam toward the powered down section of the station. There was barely enough light to guide her through the darkened node. Except for the rhythmic sigh of her own breathing, all was silent on this end. She moved through the same molecules of air that had once swirled in the lungs of people now dead. Even now, she sensed the presence of the five who had pa.s.sed on, could imagine the echoes of their voices, the last pulses of sound fracturing at last into silence.

This was the very through which they had moved, and it was still haunted by their pa.s.sing.

And soon, she thought, it will be haunted by mine.

August 24

Jared Profitt was awakened just after midnight. It took only two rings of the phone to propel him from deep sleep to a state of complete alertness. He reached for the receiver.

The voice on the other end was brusque. "This is General Gregorian. I've just spoken to our control center in Cheyenne Mountain. That so-called demo launch from Nevada continues to be on a rendezvous path with ISS."

"Which launch?"

"Apogee Engineering." Profitt frowned, trying to remember the name.

Every week there were numerous launches from sites around the world. A score of commercial aeros.p.a.ce firms were always testing booster systems or sending satellites into orbit or even blasting off cremated human remains. s.p.a.ce Command was already tracking nine thousand manmade objects in orbit. "Refresh my memory about this Nevada launch," he asked.

"Apogee is testing a new reusable launch vehicle. They sent it up at oh-seven-ten yesterday morning. They informed the FAA as required, but didn't let us know until after the fact. This billed as an orbital trial of their new RLV. A launch into low orbit, a flyby past ISS, and then reentry. We've been tracking for a day and a half now, and based on its most recent on-orbit burns, it seems possible they'll approach the station closer than they told us."

"How close will they get?"

"It depends on their next burn maneuvers."

"Close enough for an actual rendezvous? A docking?"

"That's not possible with this particular vehicle. We have all the specs on their orbiter. It's just a prototype, with no orbital system. The best it can do is a flyby and a wave."

"A wave?" Profitt suddenly sat up in bed. "Are you telling me this RLV is manned?"

"No, sir. That was just a figure of speech. Apogee says the vehicle is unmanned. There are animals aboard, including a spider monkey, but no pilot. And we've picked up no voice communication between ground and vehicle." A spider monkey, thought Profitt. Its presence aboard the s.p.a.cecraft meant they could not rule out the possibility of a human pilot. The craft's environmental monitors, the carbon dioxide levels, would not distinguish between animal or human life. He uneasy about the lack of information. He was even more uneasy about the timing of the launch. j L "I'm not certain there's any cause for alarm," said Gregorian.

"But you did ask to be notified of any orbital approaches."

"Tell me more about Apogee," Profitt cut in.

Gregorian gave a dismissive snort. "A minor player. Twelvemen 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 surprised they're still hanging in there. Their booster's based on Russian technology. The orbiter's a simple, bare-bones system 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, 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 s.p.a.ce did not const.i.tute 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 s.p.a.cecraft-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 the driveway. The night was clear, the stars like bright blue velvet. There were perhaps one hundred billion galaxies in 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 system, now seemed as absurd as the ancients' naive belief that sun and the stars revolved around the earth. The only strict requirements for life were the presence of carbon-based compounds 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 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 pa.s.sing 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. 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. 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 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 pa.s.sage 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, 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 a 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 faitha""

"In miracles?" She gave a soft laugh. "The real miracle is that am up here at all. That I'm seeing the earth from a place so few people have ever beena" She touched the window of the and felt the warmth of the sun through the gla.s.s. "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. "Any one else you want to speak to?"

"No." She sighed. "Only Jack." There was a silence.

"I thinka"I think what I want most nowa""

"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 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.

The convoy of black sedans braked to a stop in front of Apogee Engineering, tires churning up a ma.s.sive cloud of dust. Jared Profitt stepped out of the lead car and gazed up at the building. 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 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. s.p.a.ce 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 understanda""

"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."