August 16.
Jack slipped the comm unit on his head. He was alone in a back room of Mission Control, and this conversation was supposed to be confidential, but he knew that what he and Emma said today would not, in fact, be private. He suspected that all communications were now being monitored by the Air Force and U.S. Space Command.
He said, 'Capcom, this is Surgeon. I'm ready for private family conference.'
'Roger, Surgeon,' said Capcom. 'Ground Control, secure air to ground loop.' There was a pause, then, 'Surgeon, proceed to PFC.' Jack's heart was pounding. He took a deep breath and said, 'Emma, it's me.'
'He might have lived if we'd gotten him home,' she said. 'He might have had a chance.'
'We weren't the ones who stopped the evac! Again and again, NASA's been overruled. We're fighting to get you home, as soon as possible. If you'll just hang in -- '
'It won't be soon enough, Jack.' She said it quietly.
Matter-of-factly. Her words chilled him to the marrow. 'Diana is infected,' she said.
'Are you sure?'
'I just ran her amylase level. It's rising. We're watching her now. Waiting for the first symptoms. The stuff flew all over the module. We've cleaned it up, but we're not sure who else was exposed.' She paused, and he heard her take a shaky breath. 'You know those things you saw inside Andy and Jill? The things you thought were cysts? I sectioned one under the microscope. I've downlinked the images to Life Sciences. They're not cysts, Jack. And they're not spores.'
'What are they?'
'They're eggs. Something is inside them. Something is growing.'
'Growing? Are you saying they're multicellular?'
'Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying.'
He was stunned. He had assumed they were dealing with a microbe, nothing larger than a single-celled bacteria. Mankind's deadliest enemies have always been microbial -- bacteria and viruses and protozoa, too small to be seen by the human eye. If Chimera was multicellular, then it was far more advanced than a simple bacteria.
'The one I saw was still unformed,' she said. 'It was more like a -- a cluster of cells than anything else. But with vascular channels. And contractile movements. As though the whole thing was pulsating, like a culture of myocardial cells.'
'Maybe it was a culture. A group of single cells clumped together.'
'No. No, I think it was all one organism. And it was still young, still developing.'
'Into what?'
'USAMRIID knows,' she said. 'These things were growing inside Kenichi Hirai's corpse. Digesting his organs. When his disintegrated, they must have been splashed all over that orbiter.'
Which the military immediately placed under quarantine, thought Jack, remembering the choppers. The space-suited men.
'They're growing in Nicolai's corpse as well.'
He said, 'Jettison his body, Emma! Don't waste any time.'
'We're doing it now. Luther's preparing to release the body from the air lock. We have to hope the vacuum of space will kill this thing. It's a historic event, Jack. The first human burial in space.' She gave a strange laugh, but it quickly choked off into silence.
'Listen to me,' he said. 'I'm going to bring you home. If I have to ride a goddamn rocket myself and come pick you up.'
'They won't let us come home. I know that now.'
He had never heard such defeat in her voice, and it made him angry. Desperate. 'Don't wimp out on me, Emma!'
'I'm only being realistic. I've seen the enemy, Jack. Chimera is a complex multicellular lifeform. It moves. It reproduces. It turns our DNA, our genes, against us. If this is a bioengineered organism, some terrorist has just created the perfect weapon.'
'Then he must have designed a defense as well. No one unleashes a new weapon without knowing how to protect himself against it.'
'A fanatic might. A terrorist whose only interest is in killing people -- lots of people. And this thing could do that. Not only it kill, it reproduces. It spreads.' She paused. And the sound exhaustion seeped into her voice. 'Given those facts, it's clear we won't be coming home.' Jack pulled off the comm unit and dropped his head in his hands.
For a long time he sat alone in the room, the sound of Emma's still vivid in his mind. I don't know how to save you, he thought. I don't even know where to begin.
He did not hear the door open. Only when Liz Gianni from Payload Operations said his name did he finally look up.
'We have a name,' she said.
He shook his head in bewilderment. 'What?'
'I told you, I was going to look up which experiment had to be destroyed because of fungal overgrowth. It turns out it was a cell culture. The principal investigator is a Dr. Helen Koenig, a biologist out in California.'
'What about her?'
'She's disappeared. She resigned two weeks ago from the lab at SeaScience where she works. Hasn't been heard from since. And Jack, here's the kicker. I just spoke to someone at SeaScience. He told me that federal investigators raided Koenig's lab on August ninth. They removed all her files.'
Jack sat up straight. 'What was Koenig's experiment? What kind of cell culture did she send up?'
'A single-celled marine organism. They're called Archaeons.'
'It was supposed to be a three-month protocol,' said Liz. 'A study of how Archaeons multiply in microgravity. The culture began to show some bizarre results. Rapid growth, clump formation. It was multiplying at amazing rates.' They were walking along one of the pathways that wound through the JSC campus, past a pond where a fountain sprayed water into the listless air. The day was uncomfortably hot and muggy, but they felt safer talking outside, here, at least, they could speak in private.
'Cells behave differently in space,' said Jack. That, in fact, the reason cultures were grown in orbit. On earth, tissue grows like a sheet, covering the surface of the culture plate. In space, absence of gravity allows tissues to grow in three dimensions, assuming shapes it can never achieve on earth.
'Considering how exciting these developments were,' said Liz, 'it's surprising the experiment was abruptly terminated at six and a half weeks.'
'Who terminated the experiment?' asked Jack.
'The order came directly from Helen Koenig. Apparently, she analyzed the Archaeon samples which had been returned to earth aboard Atlantis and found them contaminated by fungi. She ordered the culture on ISS destroyed.'
'And was it?'
'Yes. But the weird part was how it was destroyed. The crew wasn't allowed to just bag and dispose of it in the contaminated trash, which is what they'd normally do with a nonhazardous organism. No, Koenig told them to put the cultures in the hazardous waste disposal unit and incinerate them. And then to jettison the ash.'
Jack stopped on the path and stared at her. 'If Dr. Koenig is a bioterrorist, why would she destroy her own weapon?'
'Your guess is as good as mine.' He thought about it for a moment, trying to make sense of it, but not coming up with an answer.
'Tell me more about her experiment,' he said. 'What, exactly, is an Archaeon?'
'Petrovitch and I reviewed the scientific literature. Archaeons a bizarre domain of single-celled organisms called extremophiles -- lovers of extreme conditions. They were discovered only twenty years ago, living -- and thriving -- near boiling volcanic vents on sea floor. They've also been found buried in polar ice caps and in rocks
