Tess Gerritsen: Gravity

"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 lifeform. 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 lifeform 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."

August 22.

Casper Mulholland was gobbling down his third package of Turns, and his stomach still felt like a bubbling cauldron of acid. In the distance, Apogee II glinted like a bullet casing planted point up the desert sand. She was not a particularly impressive sight, especially to this audience.

Most of them had heard the earth-shaking roar of a NASA launch, had been awed by the majesty of the shuttle's giant columns of fire streaking into the sky. Apogee was nothing like the shuttle. She was more like a child's toy rocket, and Casper could see disappointment in the eyes of the dozen or so visitors as they climbed the newly erected viewing stand and gazed across the bleak desert terrain, toward the launchpad. Every one wanted big. Every one was in love with size and power. The small, the elegantly simple, did not interest them.

Another van pulled up at the site, and a fresh group of visitors began piling out, hands lifting at once to shield their eyes from the morning sun.

He recognized Mark Lucas and Hashemi Rashad, the two businessmen who had visited Apogee over three weeks ago. He saw the same disappointment play across their faces as they squinted toward the launchpad.

"This is as close to the pad as we can get?" said Lucas.

"I'm afraid so," said Casper. "It's for your own safety. We're dealing with explosive propellants out there."

"But I thought we were going to get an in-depth look at your launch operations."

"You'll have full access to our ground-control facility -- our equivalent of Houston's Mission Control. As soon as she's off the pad, we'll drive over to the building and show you how we guide her into low earth orbit. That's the real test of our system, Mr. Lucas. Any engineering grad can launch a rocket. But getting one safely into orbit, and then guiding her to a flyby of the station, is a far more complicated matter. That's why we moved up this demonstration four days -- to hit just the right launch window for ISS. To show you our system is already rendezvous-capable. Apogee II is just the kind of bird NASA's looking to buy."

"You're not actually going to dock, are you?" said Rashad. "I heard the station is in quarantine."

"No, we're not going to dock. Apogee II's just a prototype. She can't physically hook up with ISS because she doesn't have an orbital docking system. But we'll fly her close enough to the ISS to demonstrate we can do it. You know, just the fact we're able to change our launch schedule on short notice is a selling point. When it comes to spaceflight, flexibility is key. Unexpected things pop up. My partner's recent accident, for example. Even though Mr. Obie's laid up in bed with a broken pelvis, you'll notice we didn't cancel the launch. We'll control the entire mission from ground. Gentlemen, that's flexibility."

"I can understand why you might delay a launch," said Lucas. "Say, for bad weather. By why did you have to move it up four days? Some of our partners weren't able to make it here in time."

Casper could feel the last Turns tablet bubble away in a fresh spurt of stomach acid. "It's simple, really." He paused to take handkerchief and wipe the sweat from his forehead. "It has to do with that launch window I mentioned. The space station's orbit is an inclination of fifty-one point six degrees. If you look at a of its orbital path on a map, it makes a sine wave varying between fifty-one point six degrees north and fifty-one point six degrees south. And since the earth rotates, the station passes over a place on the map with each orbit. Also, the earth isn't entirely spherical, which adds another complication. When that orbital passes over your launch site, that's the most efficient time to lift off. Adding up all those factors, we came up with various launch options. Then there's the question of daytime versus nighttime launches. Allowable launch angles. The most current weather forecasts ... " Their eyes had begun to glaze over. He'd already lost them.