Gravity (22 page)

He took a sip of water from the mouthpiece mounted inside his suit and released a heavy sigh. Though the water tasted strange, almost fishy, he thought nothing of it. Everything tasted strange microgravity. He took another sip and felt wetness splash onto his jaw. He could not reach into his helmet to brush it away, so he ignored it and gazed down at the earth. That sudden glimpse of it, spread out in breathtaking glory beneath him, made him feel a little dizzy, a little nauseated. He closed his eyes, waiting for the feeling to pass. It was motion sickness, nothing more, it often happened when you unexpectedly caught sight of earth. As his stomach settled, he became aware of a new sensation. The spilled water was now trickling up his cheek. He twitched his face, to shake off the droplet, but it continued to slide across his skin.

But I am in microgravity, where there is no up or down. Water should not be trickling at all.

He began to shake his head, tapped his gloved hand on his helmet.

Still he felt the droplet moving up his face, tracing a wet line over his jaw. Toward his ear. It had reached the edge of his comm.-assembly cap now. Surely the fabric would soak up the moisture, would prevent it from trickling further … All at once his body went rigid. The wetness had slid beneath the edge of the cap. It was now squirming toward his ear.

Not a droplet of water, not a stray trickle, but something that moved purpose. Something alive.

He thrashed left, then right, trying to dislodge it. He banged hard on his helmet. And still he felt it moving, sliding under comm assembly.

He caught dizzying glimpses of earth, then black space, then earth again, as he flailed and twisted around in a frantic dance.

The wetness slithered into his ear.

“Nicolai? Nicolai, please respond!” said Emma, watching him on the TV monitor. He was turning around and around, gloved hands battering frantically at his helmet. “Luther, he looks like he’s having a seizure!” Luther appeared on camera, moving quickly to assist his EVA partner. Nicolai kept thrashing, shaking his head back and forth.

Emma could hear them on UHF, Luther asking frantically, “What is it, what is it?”

“My ear—It is in my ear—”

“Pain? Does your ear hurt? Look at me!”

Nicolai slapped his helmet again. “It’s going deeper!” he screamed. “Get it out! Get it out!”

“What’s wrong with him?” cried Emma.

“I don’t know! Jesus, he’s panicking—”

“He’s getting too close to the tool stanchion. Get him away before he damages his suit!” On the TV monitor, Luther grabbed his partner by the arm.

“Come on, Nicolai! We’re going back in the air lock.” Suddenly Nicolai clutched at his helmet, as though to rip it off.

“No! Don’t!” screamed Luther, clutching at both of his partner’s arms in a desperate attempt to restrain him. The men thrashed together, umbilical tethers winding, tangling around them.

Griggs and Diana had joined Emma at the TV monitor, and the three of them watched in horror as the drama unfolded outside the station.

“Luther, the tool stanchion!” said Griggs. “Watch your suits!” Even as he said it, Nicolai suddenly and violently twisted in Luther’s grasp.

His helmet slammed into the tool stanchion. A stream of what looked like white mist suddenly spurted out of his faceplate.

“Luther!” cried Emma. “Check his helmet! Check his helmet!”

Luther stared at Nicolai’s faceplate. “Shit, he’s got a crack!” yelled. “I can see air leaking out! He’s decompressing!”

“Tap his emergency 2 and get him in now!” Luther reached over and flipped the emergency oxygen supply switch on Nicolai’s suit. The extra airflow might keep the suit inflated long enough for Nicolai to make it back alive. Still struggling to keep his partner under control, Luther began to haul toward the air lock.

“Hurry,” murmured Griggs. “Jesus, hurry.” It took precious minutes for Luther to drag his partner into the crew lock, for the hatch to be closed and the atmosphere repressurized. They didn’t wait for the usual air-lock integrity check, pumped the pressure straight up to one atmosphere.

The hatch swung open, and Emma dove through into the equipment lock.

Luther had already removed Nicolai’s helmet and was frantically trying to pull him out of the upper torso shell. Working together, they wriggled a struggling Nicolai out of the rest of EVA suit. Emma and Griggs dragged him through the station and into the RSM, where there was full power and light. He was screaming all the way, clawing at the left side of his comm-assembly cap.

Both eyes were swollen shut, the lids ballooned out. She touched cheeks and felt crepitus—air trapped in the subcutaneous tissues from the decompression. A line of spittle glistened on his jaw.

“Nicolai, calm down!” said Emma. “You’re all right, do you hear me? You’ll be all right!” He shrieked and yanked off the comm cap. It went flying away.

“Help me get him onto the board!” said Emma.

It took all hands to set up the medical restraint board, strip off Nicolai’s ventilation long johns, and strap him down. They had fully restrained now. Even as Emma checked his heart and lungs and examined his abdomen, he continued to whimper and rock his head from side to side.

“It’s his ear,” said Luther. He had shed his bulky EVA suit and was staring wide-eyed at the tormented Nicolai. “He said there was something in his ear.”

Emma looked closer at Nicolai’s face. At the line of spittle that traced from his chin, up the curve of his left jaw. To his ear.

She turned on the battery-powered otoscope and inserted the earpiece into Nicolai’s canal.

The first thing she saw was blood. A bright drop of it, glistening in the otoscope’s light. Then she focused on the eardrum.

It was perforated. Instead of the gleam of the tympanic membrane, she saw a black and gaping hole. Barotrauma was her first thought. Had the sudden decompression blown out his eardrum?

She checked the other eardrum, but it was intact.

“I’m puzzled,” she turned off the otoscope and looked at Luther.

“What happened out there?”

“I don’t know. We were both taking a breather. Resting up before we brought the tools back in. One minute he’s fine, the minute he’s panicking.”

“I need to look at his helmet.” She left the RSM and headed back to the equipment lock. She swung open the hatch and gazed in, at the two EVA suits, which Luther had remounted on the wall.

“What are you doing, Watson?” said Griggs, who’d followed her.

“I want to see how big the crack was. How fast he was decompressing.” She went to the smaller EVA suit, labeled “Rudenko,” and removed the helmet. Peering inside, she saw a dab of moisture adhering to the cracked faceplate. She took out a cotton swab from one of her patch pockets and touched the tip to the fluid. It was thick and gelatinous.

Blue-green.

A chill slithered up her spine.

Kenichi was in here, she suddenly remembered. The night he died, we found him in this air lock. He has somehow contaminated it.

At once she was backing out in panic, colliding with Griggs in the hatchway. “Out!” she cried. “Get out now!”

“What is it?”

“I think we’ve got a biohazard! Close the hatch! Close it!” They both scrambled out of the air lock, into the node.

Together they slammed the hatch shut and sealed it tight. They exchanged tense glances.

“You think anything leaked out?” Griggs said.

Emma scanned the node, searching for any droplets spinning through the air. At first glance she saw nothing. Then a flash of movement, a telltale sparkle, seemed to dance at the furthest periphery of her vision.

She turned to stare at it. And it was gone.

Jack sat at the surgeon’s console in Special Vehicle Operations, tension growing with every passing minute as he watched the clock on the front screen. The voices coming over his headset were speaking with new urgency, the chatter fast and staccato, as reports flew back and forth between the controllers and ISS flight director Woody Ellis. Similar in layout to the shuttle Flight Room and housed in the same building, the SVO room was a smaller, more specialized version, manned by a team dedicated only to space station operations. Over the last thirty-six hours, since Discovery had collided with ISS, this room had been the scene of relentlessly mounting anxiety, laced with intermittent panic.

With so many people in the room, so many hours of unrelieved stress, the air itself smelled of crisis, the mingled sweat and stale coffee.

Nicolai Rudenko was suffering from decompression injuries and clearly needed to be evacuated. Because there was only one lifeboat—the Crew Return Vehicle—the entire crew was coming home. This would be a controlled evacuation. No shortcuts, no mistakes. No panic. NASA had run through this simulation many times before, but a CRV evac had never actually been done, not with five living, breathing human beings aboard.

Not with someone I love aboard.

Jack was sweating, almost sick with dread.

He kept glancing at the clock, cross-checking it with his watch.

They had waited for ISS’s orbital path to reach the right position before vehicle separation could proceed. The goal was to bring the CRV down in the most direct approach possible to a landing site immediately accessible to medical personnel. The entire crew would need assistance.

After weeks of living in space, they would be weak as kittens, their muscles unable to support them.

The time for separation was approaching. It would take them twenty-five minutes to coast away from ISS and acquire GPS guidance, fifteen minutes for the deorbit burn setup. An hour to land.

In less than two hours, Emma would be back on earth. One way or another.

The thought came before he could suppress it.

Before he could stop himself from remembering the terrible sight of Jill Hewitt’s flayed body on the autopsy table.

He clenched his hands into fists, forcing himself to concentrate on Nicolai Rudenko’s biotelemetry readings. The heart rate was fast but regular, blood pressure holding steady. Come on, come on.

Let’s bring them home now.

He heard Griggs, on board ISS, report, “Capcom, my crew is all aboard the CRV and the hatch is closed. It’s a little cozy in here, we’re ready when you are.”

“Stand by to power up,” said Capcom.

“Standing by.”

“How is the patient doing?” Jack’s heart gave a leap as he heard Emma’s voice join the loop.

“His vitals remain stable, but he’s disoriented times three. The crepitus has migrated to his neck and upper torso, and it’s given him some discomfort. I’ve given him another dose of morphine.” The sudden decompression had caused air bubbles to form in his soft tissues. The condition was harmless, but painful. What Emma worried about were air bubbles in the nervous system. Could that be the reason Nicolai was confused?

Woody Ellis said, “Go for power up. Remove ECCLES seals.”

“ISS,” said Capcom, “you are now go for—”

“Belay that!” a voice cut in.

Jack looked at Flight Director Ellis in confusion. Ellis looked just as confused. He turned to face JSC director Ken Blankenship, who’d just walked into the room, accompanied by a dark-haired man in a suit and a half dozen Air Force officers.

“I’m sorry, Woody,” said Blankenship. “Believe me, this is not my decision.”

“What decision?” said Ellis.

“The evacuation is off.”

“We have a sick man up there! The CRV’s ready to go—”

“He can’t come home.”

“Whose decision is that?”

The dark-haired man stepped forward. He said, with what was almost a quiet note of apology, “The decision is mine. I’m Jared Profitt, White House Security Council. Please tell your crew to reopen the hatches and exit the CRV.”

“My crew is in trouble,” said Ellis. “I’m bringing them home.”

Trajectory cut in, “Flight, we have to go to sep now if we want them landing on target.”

Ellis nodded to Capcom. “Proceed to CRV power up. Let’s go to sep.” Before Capcom could utter another word, his headset was yanked off and he was hauled from his chair and pushed aside. An Air Force officer took Capcom’s place at the console.

“Hey!” yelled Ellis. “Hey!” All the flight controllers froze as the other Air Force officers immediately fanned out across the room. Not a weapon was drawn, but the threat was apparent.

“ISS, do not power up,” said the new Capcom. “The evacuation has been canceled. Reopen the hatches and exit the CRV.”

A baffled Griggs responded, “I don’t think I copied that, Houston.”

“The evacuation is off. Exit the CRV. We are experiencing difficulties with both TOPO and GNC computers. Flight has decided it’s best to hold off the evac.”

“How long?”

“Indefinitely.” Jack shot to his feet, ready to wrestle away Capcom’s headset.

Jared Profitt suddenly stepped in front of him, barring his way.

“You don’t understand the situation, sir.”

“My wife is on that station. We’re bringing her home.”

“They can’t come home. They may all be infected.”

“With what?” Profitt didn’t answer.

In fury, Jack lunged toward him, but was hauled back by two Air Force officers.

“Infected with what?” Jack yelled.

“A new organism,” said Profitt. “A chimera.”

Jack looked at Blankenship’s stricken face. He looked at the Air Force officers who now stood poised to assume control of the consoles. Then he noticed another familiar face, that of Leroy Cornell, who’d just come into the room.

Cornell looked pale and shaken.

That’s when Jack understood that this decision had been made at the very top. That nothing he, or Blankenship, or Woody Ellis would make a difference.

NASA was no longer in control.

They gathered at Jack’s house, where all the shades were drawn.

They didn’t dare meet at JSC, where they would most certainly be noticed. They were all so stunned by the sudden takeover of NASA operations they had no idea how to proceed. This was one crisis which they had no operations manual, no contingency plans. Jack had invited only a handful of people, all of them from inside NASA operations, Todd Cutler, Gordon Obie, Flight Directors Woody Ellis and Randy Carpenter, and Liz Gianni from the Payload Directorate.

The doorbell rang, and everyone tensed.

“He’s here,” said Jack, and he opened the door.

Dr. Eli Petrovitch from NASA’s Life Sciences Directorate stepped in, clutching a laptop carrying case. He was a thin and fragile man who, for the past two years, had been battling Lymphoma. Clearly he was losing the war. Most of his hair had fallen out, and only a few brittle white strands remained. His skin like yellowed parchment, stretched over the jutting bones of his face. But there was the glow of excitement in his eyes, lit by a scientist’s unflagging curiosity.

“Did we get it?” asked Jack.

Petrovitch nodded and patted his briefoase. On that skeletal face, his smile looked ghoulish. “USAMRIID has agreed to share some of its data.”

“Some?”

“Not all. Much of the genome remains classified. We were given only parts of the sequence, with large gaps. They’re given us just enough to prove that the situation is grave.” He carried a laptop to the dining room table and flipped it open. As everyone crowded around to watch, Petrovitch booted up the computer, then slipped in a floppy disk.

Data began to scroll down, line after line of seemingly random letters marching at a dizzying pace down the screen. It was not text, these letters did not spell out words at all, but a code. The four letters reappeared again and again, in a changing sequence, A, T, G, and C. They represented the nucleotides adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. The building blocks that made up DNA. string of letters was a genome, the chemical blueprint for a organism.

“This,” said Petrovitch, “is their chimera. The organism that killed Kenichi Hirai.”

“What is this ky-mir-ra’ thing I keep hearing about?” asked Randy Carpenter. “For the sake of us ignorant engineers, maybe you could explain it?”

“Certainly,” said Petrovitch. “And there’s no reason to feel ignorant. It’s not a term used much outside of molecular biology. The word comes from the ancient Greeks. Chimera was a mythological beast, said to be unconquerable. A fire-breathing creature with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. She was eventually slain by a hero named Bellerophon. It wasn’t exactly a fight, because he cheated. He hitched a ride on Pegasus, the horse, and shot arrows down at Chimera from above.”

“This mythology is interesting,” cut in Carpenter impatiently, “but what’s the relevance?”

“The Greek Chimera was a bizarre creature made up of three different animals. Lion, goat, and serpent, all combined into one. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing here, in this chromosome. A creature as bizarre as the beast killed by Bellerophon. This is a biological chimera whose DNA comes from at least three unrelated species.”

“Can you identify those species?” asked Carpenter.

Petrovitch nodded. “Over the years, scientists around the world have amassed a library of gene sequences from a variety of species, from viruses to elephants. But collecting this data is slow and tedious. It’s taken decades just to analyze the human genome. So you can imagine, there are a number of species that haven’t been sequenced. Large areas of this chimera’s genome can’t be identified, they’re nowhere in the library. But here’s what we have been able to identify so far.” He clicked on the icon for “species matches.” On the screen appeared, Mus musculis common mouse), Rana pipiens (northern leopard frog), Homo sapiens.

“This organism is part mouse, part amphibian. And part human.” He paused. “In a sense,” he said, “the enemy is us.” The room fell silent.

“Which of our genes is on that chromosome?” Jack asked softly. “What part of Chimera is human?”

“An interesting question,” said Petrovitch, nodding in approval.

“It deserves an interesting answer. You and Dr. Cutler will appreciate the significance of this list.” He typed on the keyboard.

On the screen appeared, Phospholipase A.

“My God,” murmured Todd Cutler. “These are all digestive enzymes.” The organism is primed to devour its host, thought Jack. It uses these enzymes to digest us from the inside, reducing our muscles and organs and connective tissue to little more than a foul soup.

“Jill Hewitt—she told us Hirai’s body had disintegrated,” said Randy Carpenter. “I thought she was hallucinating.”

Jack said suddenly, “This has got to be a bioengineered organism! Someone cooked this thing up in a lab. Took a bacteria or virus and grafted on genes from other species, to make it a more effective killing machine.”

“But which bacteria? Which virus?” said Petrovitch. “That’s the mystery here. Without more of the genome to examine, we can’t identify which species they started off with. USAMRIID refuses to show us the most important part of this organism’s chromosome. The part that identifies this killer.” He looked at Jack.

“You’re the only one here who’s actually seen the pathology at autopsy.”

“It was only a glimpse. They pushed me out of the room so fast I barely got a look. What I saw appeared to be some sort of cysts. The size of pearls, embedded in a blue-green matrix. They were in Mercer’s thorax and abdomen. In Hewitt’s cranium. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“Could they have been hydatid cysts?” asked Petrovitch.

“What’s that?” asked Woody.

“It’s an infection by the larval stage of a parasitic tapeworm called echinococcus. It causes cysts in the liver and lungs. For matter, in any organ.”

“You think this could be a parasite?”

Jack shook his head. “Hydatid cysts take a long time to grow. Years, not days. I don’t think this was a parasite.”

“Maybe they weren’t cysts at all,” said Todd. “Maybe they were spores. Fungus balls. Aspergillus or cryptococcus.”

Liz Gianni from Payloads cut in, “The crew reported a problem with fungal contamination. One of the experiments had to be destroyed because of overgrowth.”

“Which experiment?” asked Todd.

“I’d have to look it up. I remember it was one of the cell cultures.”

“But simple fungal contamination wouldn’t account for these deaths,” said Petrovitch. “Remember, there were fungi floating around Mir all the time, and no one died of it.” He looked at the computer screen. “This genome tells us we’re dealing with a new life-form. I agree with Jack. It must have been engineered.”

“So it’s bioterrorism,” said Woody Ellis. “Someone’s sabotaged our station. They must have sent it up in one of the payloads.” Liz Gianni vigorously shook her head. Aggressive and intense, she was a forceful presence at any meeting, and she spoke up now with absolute assurance.

“Every payload goes through safety review. There are hazard reports, three-phase analyses of all containment devices. Believe me, we would have nixed anything dangerous.”

“Assuming you knew it was dangerous,” said Ellis.

“Of course we’d know!”

“What if there was a breach in security?” said Jack. “Many of the experimental payloads arrive directly from the principal investigators—the scientists themselves. We don’t know what their security is like. We don’t know if they have a terrorist working lab. If they switched a bacterial culture at the last minute, we necessarily wouldn’t know?”

For the first time Liz looked uncertain. “It … it’s unlikely.”

“But it could happen.” Though she wouldn’t admit the possibility, dismay registered in her eyes. “We’ll grill every principal investigator,” she said.

“Every scientist who sent up an experiment. If they had a lapse in security, I’m fucking well gonna find out about it.”

She probably will, thought Jack. Like the other men in the room, he was a little afraid of Liz Gianni.

“There’s one question we haven’t asked yet,” said Gordon Obie, speaking up for the first time. As always, he’d been the Sphinx, listening without comment, silently processing information. “The question is why? Why would anyone sabotage the station? Is this someone with a grudge against us? A fanatic to technology?”

“The biological equivalent of the Unabomber,” said Todd Cutler.

“Then why not just release the organism at JSC and kill off our infrastructure? That would be easier, and far more logical.”

“You can’t apply logic to a fanatic,” Cutler pointed out.

“You can apply logic to everyone, including fanatics,” Gordon responded.

“As long as you know the framework in which they operate. And that’s why this bothers me. That’s why I wonder if we’re really dealing with sabotage.”

“What else would it be,” said Jack, “if not sabotage?”

“There is another possibility. It could be something just as frightening,” said Gordon, his troubled gaze lifting to Jack’s. “A mistake.”

Dr. Isaac Roman ran down the hall, his pager alarm squealing on his belt, dreading what he was about to face. He silenced the beeper and opened the door leading into the Level 4 isolation suite. He did not enter the patient’s room, but stood safely outside and stared the horror unfolding beyond the observation window.

There was blood splattered on the walls and pooling on the floor where Dr. Nathan Helsinger lay seizing. Two nurses and a physician in space suits were trying to stop him from injuring himself, but his spasms were so violent and so powerful they could not restrain him. His leg shot out and a nurse went sprawling, across the blood-slicked concrete floor.

Roman hit the intercom button. “Your suit! Is there a breach?” As she slowly rose to her feet, he could see her expression of terror. She looked down at her gloves, her sleeves, then at the juncture where the hose fed air into her suit. “No,” she said, and it was almost a sob of relief. “No breach.”

Blood splattered the window. Roman jerked back as bright droplets trickled down the glass. Helsinger was banging his head against the floor now, his spine relaxing, then hyperextending.

Opisthotonos. Roman had seen this bizarre posture only once before, in a victim of strychnine poisoning, the body curved backward like a bow strung under tension. Helsinger spasmed again, and his skull slammed backward against the concrete. Blood sprayed the faceplates of the two nurses.

“Back off!” Roman commanded through the intercom.

“He’s hurting himself!” said the physician.

“I don’t want anyone else exposed.”

“If we could get these seizures under control—”

“There’s nothing you can do to save him. I want you all to move away now. Before you get hurt.” Reluctantly the two nurses backed away. After a pause, so did the physician. They stood in silent helplessness as the scene of horror played out at their feet.

New convulsions sent Helsinger’s head whipping backward.

The scalp split open, like cloth ripping along a seam. The pool blood widened into a lake.

“Oh, God, look at his eyes!” one of the nurses cried.

The eyes were popping out, like two giant marbles straining to burst out of the sockets. Traumatic proptosis, thought Roman.

Helsinger’s eyeballs thrust forward by catastrophic intracranial pressure, the lids shoved apart, wide and staring.

The seizures continued, unrelenting, the head battering the floor.

Splinters of bone flew up and ticked against the window.

It was as though he were trying to crack open his own skull, to free whatever was trapped inside.

Another crack. Another spattering of blood and bone.

He should have been dead. Why was he still seizing?

But even decapitated chickens continue to twitch and thrash, and Helsinger’s death throes were not yet over. His head lifted the floor, his spine curling forward like a spring winding up to unbearable tension just before it snaps. His neck lashed backward.

There was a crack, and the skull split open like an egg. Shards of bone flew everywhere. A lump of gray matter splashed the window.

Roman gasped and stumbled backward, nausea rising in his throat. He dropped his head, fighting to stay in control. He struggled against the darkness that threatened to envelop his vision.

Sweating, shaking, he managed to lift his head. To look, once again, through the window.

Nathan Helsinger at last lay still. What was left of his head rested in a lake of blood. There was so much blood that for a moment Roman could not focus on anything else but that spreading pool of scarlet. Then his gaze settled on the dead man’s face. On a blue-green mass that clung, quivering, to his forehead. Cysts.

Chimera.