“Now I understand why you tested the hyperbaric chamber.”

“All this time Chimera has existed benignly in the rift. We thought, if we reproduced those pressures, we could make it benign again.”

“And can you?”

Roman shook his head. “Only temporarily. This life-form has been permanently altered by exposure to microgravity. Somehow, when it was brought to ISS, its reproductive switch was turned on. It’s as if it was preprogrammed to be lethal. But it needed the absence of gravity to start that program running again.”

“How temporary is hyperbaric treatment?”

“Infected mice stay healthy as long as they’re in the chamber. We’ve kept them alive ten days now. But as soon as we take any of them out, the disease continues its progression.”

“What about Ranavirus?” Only an hour ago, Dr. Wang from NASA Life Sciences had briefed Jack by phone. At that very moment, a supply of the amphibian virus was winging its way by Air Force jet to Dr. Roman’s lab. “Our scientists believe it could work.”

“Theoretically. But it’s too early to launch a rescue shuttle. We have to prove Ranavirus works, or you’d risk the lives of another shuttle crew. We need time to test the virus. Several weeks, at least.” Emma doesn’t have weeks, thought Jack. She has only three days’ worth of HCG. In silence he gazed down at the cage of rat corpses. At the eggs, glistening in their nest of slime.

Time. A thought suddenly occurred to him. The memory of something Roman had just said.

“You said the hyperbaric chamber has kept mice alive for ten days so far.”

“That’s correct.”

“But it was only ten days ago that Discovery crashed.” Roman avoided his gaze.

“You planned the chamber tests right from the start. Which means you already knew what you were dealing with. Even before you performed the autopsies.” Roman turned and started to walk back to the elevator. He gave a gasp of surprise when Jack caught him by the collar and spun him around.

“That wasn’t a commercial payload,” said Jack. “Was it?” Roman pushed away and stumbled backward, against the wall.

“Defense used SeaScience as a cover,” said Jack. “You paid them to send up the experiment for you. To hide the fact that this life-form is of military interest.” Roman sidled toward the elevator. Toward escape.

Jack grabbed the man’s lab coat and tightened his grip on the collar.

“This wasn’t bioterrorism. This was your own fucking mistake!”

Roman’s face had turned purple. “I can’t—can’t breathe!” Jack released him, and Roman slid down the wall, his legs collapsing beneath him. For a moment he didn’t speak, but sat slumped on the floor, struggling to catch his breath. When at last he did talk, all he could manage was a whisper.

“We had no way of knowing what it would do. How it would change without gravity…”

“But you knew it was alien.”

“Yes.”

“And you knew it was a chimera. That it already had amphibian DNA.

“No. No, we didn’t know that.”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

“We don’t know how the frog DNA got onto the genome! It must have happened in Dr. Koenig’s lab. A mistake of some kind. She was the one who found the organism in the rift, the one who finally realized what it was. SeaScience knew we’d be interested. An extraterrestrial organism—of course we were! Defense paid for their KC-135 experiments. We funded the payload space on ISS. It couldn’t go up as a military payload. There’d be too many questions asked, too many review committees. NASA would wonder why the Army cared about harmless sea microbes. But no one questions the private sector. So it went up as a commercial payload, with SeaScience as sponsor. And Dr. Koenig as principal investigator.

“Where is Dr. Koenig?”

Slowly Roman rose to his feet. “She’s dead.”

That information took Jack by surprise. “How?” he asked.

“It was an accident.”

“You think I believe that?”

“It’s the truth.” Jack studied the man for a moment and decided Roman was not lying.

“It happened over two weeks ago in Mexico,” said Roman.

“Just after she resigned from SeaScience. The taxi she was riding was completely destroyed.”

“And USAMRIID’s raid on her lab? You weren’t there to investigate, were you? You were there to see that all her files were destroyed.”

“We are talking about an alien life-form. An organism more dangerous than we realized. Yes, the experiment was a mistake, catastrophe. Just imagine what could happen if this information leaked out to the world’s terrorists?” This was why NASA had been kept in the dark. Why the truth could never be revealed.

“And you haven’t seen the worst of it yet, Dr. McCallum,” said Roman.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s one more thing I want to show you.” They rode the elevator down to the next level, to subbasement three. Deeper into Hades, thought Jack. Once again they stepped out to face a wall of glass, and beyond it, another lab with more space-suited workers.

Roman pressed the intercom button and said, “Could you bring out the specimen?” One of the lab workers nodded. She crossed to a walk-in steel vault, spun the massive combination lock, and disappeared inside.

When she emerged again, she was wheeling a cart with a steel container on a tray. She rolled it to the viewing window.

Roman nodded.

She unlatched the steel container, lifted out a Plexiglas cylinder, and set it on the tray. The contents bobbed gently in a clear bath formalin.

“We found this burrowed inside the spinal column of Kenichi Hirai,” said Roman. “His spine protected it from the force of when Discovery crashed. When we removed it, it was still alive—but only barely.”

Jack tried to speak, but could not produce a single word. He heard only the hiss of the ventilation fans and the roar of his own pulse as he stared in horror at the contents of the cylinder.

“This is what the larvae grow into,” said Roman. “This is the next stage.”

He understood, now. The reason for secrecy. What he had seen preserved in formalin, coiled up in that Plexiglas cylinder, had explained everything. Though it had been mangled during extraction, its essential features had been apparent. The glossy skin. The larval tail. And the fetal curl of the spine—not amphibian, but something far more horrifying, because its genetic class was recognizable. Mammalian, he thought. Maybe even human. It was already beginning to look like its host.

Allowed to infect a different species, it would change its appearance yet again. It could raid the DNA of any organism on earth, assume any shape. Eventually it could evolve to the point where it needed no host at all in which to grow and reproduce. It would be independent and self-sufficient. Perhaps even intelligent.

And Emma was now a living nursery for these things, her body a nourishing cocoon in which they were growing.

Jack shivered as he stood on the tarmac and stared across the barren airstrip. The Army jeep that had brought him and Gordon back to White Sands Air Force Base had receded to barely a glint now, trailing a fantail of dust into the horizon. The sun’s white-hot brilliance brought tears to his eyes, and for a moment, the shimmered out of focus, as though underwater.

He turned to look at Gordon. “There’s no other way. We have to do it.”

“There are a thousand things that can go wrong.”

“There always are. That’s true for every launch, every mission. Why should this one be any different?”

“There’ll be no contingencies. No safety backups. I know what we’re dealing with, and it’s a cowboy operation.”

“Which makes it possible. What’s their motto? Smaller, faster, cheaper.”

“Okay,” said Gordon, “let’s say you don’t blow up on the launchpad. Say the Air Force doesn’t blast you out of the sky. When you get up there, you’re still faced with the biggest gamble of all, whether the Ranavirus will work.”