“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.

She slammed the drawer shut. “There’s nothing on this station I can use!”

“If we launched the shuttle tomorrow—if we got the hormones up to you—”

“They won’t launch! And even if you could send up a whole damn pharmacy, it’d still take three days to get to me!” In three days, she would most likely be dead.

She clung to the blood-splattered locker, her breaths coming hard and fast, every muscle taut with frustration. With despair.

“Then we have to approach this from another angle,” said Jack.

“Emma, stay with me on this! I need you to help me think.” She released a sharp breath. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Why would hormones work? What’s the mechanism? We know they’re chemical signals—an internal communication system at the cellular level. They work by activating or repressing gene expression. By changing the cell’s programming…” He was rambling now, letting his stream of consciousness lead him toward solution. “In order for a hormone to work, it has to bind to a specific receptor on the target cell. It’s like a key, in search the right lock in which to fit. Maybe if we studied the data from SeaScience—if we could find out what other DNA Dr. Koenig grafted onto this organism’s genome—we might know how to shut off Chimera’s reproduction.”

“What do you know about Dr. Koenig? What other research has she worked on? That might be a clue.”

“We have her curriculum vitae. We’ve seen her published papers on Archaeons. Other than that, she’s something of a mystery to us. So is SeaScience. We’re still trying to dig up information.” That will take precious time, she thought. I don’t have much of it left.

Her hands ached from gripping Diana’s locker. She relaxed her hold and drifted away, as though swept along on a tide of despair.

Loose items from Diana’s locker floated around her in the air, evidence of Diana’s sweet tooth. Chocolate bars. M&M’s. A cellophane package of crystallized ginger candy. It was that last that Emma suddenly focused on. Crystallized ginger.

Crystals.

“Jack,” she said. “I have an idea.” Her heart was racing as she swam out of the Russian service module and headed back into the U.S. Lab. There she turned on payload computer. The monitor glowed an eerie amber in the darkened module. She called up the operations data files and clicked on “ESA.” European Space Agency. Here were all the procedures and reference materials required to operate the ESA payload experiments.

“What are you thinking, Emma?” came Jack’s voice over her comm unit.

“Diana was working on protein crystal growth, remember? Pharmaceutical research.”

“Which proteins?” he shot back, and she knew he understood exactly what she was thinking.

“I’m scrolling down the list now. There are dozens…” The protein names raced up the screen in a blur. The cursor halted on the entry she’d been searching for, “Human chorionic gonadotropin.”