reply, in an uneven voice, 'Uh, roger, CRV . We'll have the beer keg waiting for you, Luther of' buddy. Dancing girls. The whole works .'
'Geez, you guys have loosened up since we last spoke. Okay, looks like I'm bout ready for LOS. You keep that beer cold, and I -- ' There was a loud burst of static. Then the transmission went dead.
The blip on the front screen exploded into a shocking sunburst of fragments, scattering into delicate pixels of dust.
Woody Ellis crumpled into his chair and dropped his head in his hands.
'Securing air-to-ground loop,' said Capcom. 'Stand by, ISS.'
'Talk to me, Jack . Please talk to me, Emma pleaded silently as she floated in the hab's semidarkness. With the circulation fans shut down, the module was so quiet she could hear the whoosh of her own pulse, the movement of air rushing in and out of her lungs.
She was startled when Capcom's voice suddenly said, 'Air-to-ground secure. You may proceed to PFC.'
'Jack?' she said.
'I'm here. I'm right here, sweetheart.'
'He was clean! I told them he was clean -- '
'We tried to stop it! The order came straight from the White House. They didn't want to take any chances.'
'It's my fault.' Her exhaustion suddenly gave way to tears. She was alone and scared. And haunted by her catastrophically wrong decision. 'I thought they'd let him come back. I thought it was best chance of staying alive.'
'Why did you stay behind, Emma?'
'I had to.' She took a deep breath and said, 'I'm infected.'
'You were exposed. That doesn't mean you're infected.'
'I just ran my own blood tests, Jack. My amylase level is rising.'
He said nothing.
'I'm now eight hours postexposure. I should have another twenty-four to forty-eight hours before I ... can no longer function.' Her voice had steadied. She sounded strangely calm now, as though she were talking about a patient's impending death. Not her own. 'That's enough time to get a few things in order. Jettison bodies. Change out some of the filters, and get the fans working again. It should make cleanup easier for the next crew. If there is a next crew ... ' Jack still hadn't spoken.
'As for my own remains ... ' Her voice had steadied to numb dispassion, all emotions suppressed. 'When the time comes, I think the best thing I can do, for the good of the station, is to go EVA. Where I can't contaminate anything after I die. After my body ... '
She paused. 'The Orlan is easy enough to get into without assistance. I have Valium and narcotics on hand. Enough to put me under. So I'll be asleep when my air runs out. You know, Jack, it's not such a bad way to go, when you think about it. Floating outside. Looking at the earth, the stars. And just drifting off to sleep.' She heard him then. He was crying.
'Jack,' she said softly. 'I love you. I don't know why things apart between us. I know some of it had to be my fault.'
He drew in a shuddering breath. 'Emma, don't.'
'It's so stupid that I waited this long to tell you. You probably think I'm only saying it now because I'm going to die. But, Jack, honest-to-God truth is -- '
'You're not going to die.' He said it again, with anger. 'You not going to die.'
'You've heard Dr. Roman's results. Nothing has worked.'
'The hyperbaric chamber has.'
'They can't get a chamber up here in time. And without a lifeboat, I can't get home. Even if they'd let me return.'
'There's got to be a way. Something you can do to reproduce the chamber's effect. It's working on infected mice. It's keeping them alive, so it's doing something. They're the only ones who've survived.' No, she suddenly realized. Not the only ones.
Slowly, she turned and stared at the hatchway leading into Node 1. The mouse, she thought. Is the mouse still alive?
'Emma?'
'Stand by. I'm going to check something in the lab.' She swam through Node I, into the U.S. lab. The stench of dried blood was just as strong in here, and even in the gloom, could see the dark splatters on the walls. She floated across to animal habitat, pulled out the mouse enclosure, and shone a flashlight inside.
The beam captured a pitiful sight. The bloated mouse was in its agonal throes, limbs thrashing out, mouth open, drawing in gulps of air.
You can't be dying, she thought. You're the survivor, the exception to the rule. The proof that there's still hope for me.
The mouse twisted, body corkscrewing in agony. A thread of blood curled out from between the hind legs, broke off into droplets. Emma knew what would come next, the final flurry of seizures as the brain dissolved into a soup of digested proteins. saw a fresh pulse of blood stain the white fur of the hindquarters.
And then she saw something else, something pink, protruding between the legs.
It was moving.
The mouse thrashed again.
The pink thing slid all the way out, writhing and hairless.
Tethered to its abdomen was a single glistening strand. An cord.
'Jack,' she whispered. 'Jack!'
'I'm here.'
'The mouse -- the female -- '
'What about it?'
'These last three weeks, she's been exposed again and again to Chimera, and she hasn't gotten sick. She's the only one who's survived.'
'She's still alive?'
'Yes. And I think I know why. She was pregnant.' The mouse began to writhe again. Another pup slid out in a glistening veil of blood and mucus.
'It must have happened that night when Kenichi put her with the males,' she said. 'I haven't been handling her. I never realized ... '
'Why would pregnancy make a difference? Why should it be protective?' Emma floated in the gloom, struggling to come up with an answer. The recent EVA and the shock of Luther's death had left her physically drained. She knew that Jack was just as exhausted.
Two tired brains, working against the ticking time bomb of her infection.
'Okay. Okay, let's think about pregnancy,' she said. 'It's a complex physiological condition. It's more than just the gestation of a fetus. It's an altered metabolic state.'
'Hormones. Pregnant animals are chemically high on hormones. If we can mimic that state, maybe we can reproduce what's happened in that mouse.' Hormone therapy. She thought of all the different chemicals circulating in a pregnant woman's body. Estrogen. Progesterone. Prolactin. Human chorionic gonadotropin.
'Birth control pills,' said Jack. 'You could mimic pregnancy with contraceptive hormones.'
'We have nothing like that on board. It's not part of the medical kit.'
'Have you checked Diana's personal locker?'
'She wouldn't take contraceptives without my knowledge. I'm the medical officer. I'd know about it.'
'Check it anyway. Do it, Emma.' She shot out of the lab. In the Russian service module, she quickly pulled open the drawers in Diana's locker.
It felt wrong, be pawing through another woman's private possessions.
Even dead woman's. Among the neatly folded clothes she uncovered a private stash of candy. She hadn't known that Diana loved sweets, there was so much about Diana she would never know. In another drawer she found shampoo and toothpaste and tampons. No birth control pills.
