'The spill's coming from the shroud!'
'What is it? Blood, serum?'
'There's a tear in the plastic. I can see it leaking out!'
What was leaking out?
She heard other voices in the background. Loud groans of disgust, and the sound of someone retching.
'Seal it off. Seal it off!' said Emma. But they didn't answer.
Jill Hewitt said, 'His body feels like mush. As if he's ... dissolving. We should find out what's happening to it.'
'No!' cried Emma. 'Discovery, do not open the shroud!' To her relief, Kittredge finally responded, 'Roger that, Watson. O'Leary, seal it up. We're not going to let any more of ... that stuff ... leak out.'
'Maybe we should jettison the body,' said Jill.
'No,' Kittredge answered. 'They want it for autopsy.'
'What sort of fluid is it?' asked Emma. 'Bob, answer me!'
There was a silence. Then he said, 'I don't know. But whatever it is, I hope it's not infectious. Because we've all been exposed.'
Twenty-eight pounds of flab and fur. That was Humphrey, sprawled like a fat pasha on Jack's chest. This cat is trying to murder me, thought Jack, staring up into Humphrey's malevolent green eyes.
He'd fallen asleep on the couch, and the next thing he knew, a ton of kitty lard was crushing his ribs, squeezing the air out of his lungs.
Purring, Humphrey sank a claw into Jack's chest.
With a yelp, Jack shoved him away, and Humphrey landed on all fours with a ponderous thump.
'Go catch a mouse,' Jack muttered, and turned on his side to resume his nap, but it was hopeless. Humphrey was yowling to be fed. Again.
Yawning, Jack dragged himself off the couch and stumbled into the kitchen. As soon as he opened the cupboard where the cat food was stored, Humphrey began to yowl louder. Jack filled the cat bowl with Little Friskies and stood watching in disgust as his nemesis chowed down. It was only three in the afternoon, and Jack had not yet caught up on his sleep. He'd been awake all night, manning the surgeon's console in the space control room, and then had come home and settled on the couch to review the ECLSS subsystems for the space station. He was back in the game, and it felt good. It even felt good to wade through a bone-dry MOD training manual. But fatigue had finally caught up with him, and he'd dropped off to sleep around noon, surrounded by stacks of flight manuals.
Humphrey's bowl was already half empty. Unbelievable.
As Jack turned to leave the kitchen, the phone rang.
It was Todd Cutler. 'We're rounding up medical personnel to meet Discovery at White Sands,' he said. 'The plane's leaving Ellington in thirty minutes.'
'Why White Sands? I thought Discovery was going to wait for Edwards to clear up.'
'We've got a medical situation on board, and we can't wait for the weather to clear. They're going to deorbit in an hour. Plan infectious precautions.'
'What's the infection?'
'Not yet identified. We're just playing it safe. Are you with us?'
'Yeah, I'm with you,' said Jack, without an instant's hesitation.
'Then you'd better get moving or you'll miss the plane.'
'Wait. Who's the patient? Which one's sick?'
'They all are,' said Cutler. 'The entire crew.'
Infectious precautions. Emergency deorbit. What are we dealing with?
The wind was blowing, kicking up dust as Jack trotted across the tarmac toward the waiting jet. Squinting against flying grit, climbed the steps and ducked into the aircraft. It was a IV seating fifteen passengers, one of a fleet of sturdy and workhorses that NASA used to shuttle personnel between its many far-flung centers of operation. There were already a dozen people aboard, including a number of nurses and doctors from the Flight Medicine Clinic. Several of them gave Jack waves of greeting.
'We've got to get going, sir,' said the copilot. 'So if you buckle right in.' Jack took a window seat near the front of the plane.
Roy Bloomfeld was the last to step aboard, his bright red hair stiff from the wind. As soon as Bloomfeld took his seat, they closed the hatch.
'Todd isn't coming?' asked Jack.
'He's manning the console for landing. Looks like we're gonna be the shock troops.' The plane began to taxi out onto the runway. They could waste no time, it was an hour-and-a-half flight to White Sands.
'You know what's going on?' Jack asked. 'Cause I'm in the dark.'
'I got a brief rundown. You know that spill they had on Discovery yesterday? The one they've been trying to identify? Turns out it was fluids leaking from Kenichi Hirai's body bag.'
'That bag was sealed tight. How did it leak?'
'Tear in the plastic. The crew says the contents seem to be under pressure. Some sort of advanced decomposition going on.'
'Kittredge described the fluid as green and only mildly fishy smelling. That hardly sounds like fluid from a decomposing corpse.'
'We're all puzzled. The bag's been resealed. We'll have to wait till they land to find out what's going on inside. It's the first we've dealt with human remains in microgravity. Maybe there's something different about the process of decomposition. Maybe the anaerobic bacteria die off, and that's why it's not giving off odors.'
'How sick is the crew?'
'Both Hewitt and Kittredge are complaining of severe headaches. Mercer's throwing up like a dog now, and O'Leary's got abdominal pain. We're not sure how much of it is psychological. There's gotta be an emotional reaction when you've been gulping in a decomposing colleague.'
Psychological factors certainly complicated the picture. Whenever there is an outbreak of food poisoning, a significant percentage of victims are, in fact, uninfected. The power of suggestion is so strong it can produce vomiting as severe as any real illness.
'They had to put off the undocking. White Sands has been having problems too. One of their TACANS was transmitting erroneous signals. They needed a few hours to get it up and functioning again.' The TACAN, or tactical air navigation locating system, was a series of ground transmitters that provided the orbiter with updates on its navigation-state vector. A bad TACAN signal could cause the shuttle to miss the runway entirely.
'Now they've decided they can't wait,' said Bloomfeld. 'In just the last hour, the crew's gotten sicker. Kittredge and Hewitt have scleral hemorrhages. That's how it started with Hirai.' Their plane began its takeoff roll. The roar of the engines filled their ears, and the ground dropped away.
Jack yelled over the noise, 'What about ISS? Is anyone sick on the station?'
'No. They kept the hatches closed between vehicles to contain the spill.'
'So it's confined to Discovery?'
'So far as we know.' Then Emma's okay, he thought, releasing a deep breath.
Emma's safe. But if a contagion had been brought aboard Discovery inside Hirai's corpse, why wasn't the space station crew infected as well?
'What's the shuttle's ETA?' he asked.
'They're undocking now. Burn target's in forty-five minutes, and touchdown should be around seventeen hundred.' Which didn't give the ground crew much time to prepare. He stared out the window as they broke through the clouds into a golden bath of sunlight. Everything is working against us, he thought. An emergency landing. A broken TACAN shack. A sick crew.
And it will all come together on a runway in the middle of nowhere.
Jill Hewitt's head hurt, and her eyeballs were aching so badly she could barely focus on the undocking checklist. In just the last hour pain had crept into every muscle of her body, and now it felt as if jagged bolts were
