Tess Gerritsen: Gravity

"Anyway," Casper finished with a profound sense of relief, "today at seven-ten A.M. turns out to be the best choice. That makes perfect sense to you, right?"

Lucas seemed to give himself a shake, like a startled dog coming out of a nap. "Yes. Of course."

"I'd still like to get closer," said Mr. Rashad on a wistful note.

He gazed at the rocket, a snub-nosed blip on the horizon. "From this far away, she's not much to look at, is she? So small." Casper smiled, even as he felt his own stomach digest itself in nervous acid. "Well, you know what they say, Mr. Rashad. It's not the size that matters. It's what you do with it." This is the last option, thought Jack as a bead of perspiration dripped down his temple and soaked into the lining of his flight helmet. He tried to calm his racing pulse, but his heart was like a frantic animal trying to batter its way out of his chest. For so many years, this was the moment he had dreamed of, strapped into the flight seat, helmet closed, oxygen flowing. The countdown ticking toward zero. In those dreams, fear had not been part of the equation, excitement. Anticipation. He had not expected to be terrified.

"You are at T minus five minutes. The time to back out is now." It was Gordon Obie's voice over the hardline comm. At every step of the way, Gordon had offered Jack chances to change his mind.

During the flight from White Sands to Nevada. In the early morning hours, as Jack suited up in the Apogee Engineering hangar. And finally, on the drive across the pitch-black desert to the launchpad.

This was Jack's last opportunity.

"We can stop the countdown now," said Gordon. "Nix the whole mission."

"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 damn 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 Godspeed, 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 space.

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 damn 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-seven ... " The whispers became a chorus of murmurs, growing louder with each passing second.

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

His pulse throbbed in his fingertips.

"Seven. six. Five ... " He closed his eyes. Oh, God, what had they done?

"Three. Two. One ... " 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 prick 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 shivering 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 lifeform 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 lifeform 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 passed 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 passing.

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 aerospace firms were always testing booster systems or sending satellites into orbit or even blasting off cremated human remains. Space Command was already tracking nine thousand manmade objects in orbit. "Refresh my memory about this Nevada launch," he asked.