Where Emma was dying.

The crowd in the viewing stand had fallen ominously silent. The countdown clock, displayed on the closed-circuit video feed, slid past the T minus sixty seconds mark and kept ticking. They’re going for the launch window, thought Casper, and the fresh sweat of panic bloomed on his forehead. In his heart, he had never believed it would come to this moment. He had expected delays, aborts, even a cancellation. He had lived through so many disappointments, so much bad luck with this damn bird, that dread like bile in his throat. He glanced at the faces in the stands and that many of them were mouthing the seconds as they ticked by. It started as a whisper, a rhythmic disturbance in the air.

“Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven…” The whispers became a chorus of murmurs, growing louder with each passing second.

“Twelve. Eleven. Ten…” Casper’s hands were shaking so hard he had to clutch the railing.

His pulse throbbed in his fingertips.

“Seven. six. Five…” He closed his eyes. Oh, God, what had they done?

“Three. Two. One…” The crowd sucked in a simultaneous gasp of wonder. Then the roar of the boosters spilled over him, and his eyes flew open. He stared at the sky, at the streak of fire lifting toward the heavens. Any second now it would happen. First the blinding flash, then, behind at the speed of sound, the pulse of the explosion battering their eardrums. That’s how it had happened with Apogee I. But the fiery streak kept on rising until it was only a pale dot punched in the deep blue sky.

A hand clapped his back, hard. He gave a start and turned to see Mark Lucas beaming at him.

“Way to go, Mulholland! What a gorgeous launch!” Casper ventured another terrified glance at the sky. Still no explosion.

“But I guess you never had any doubts, did you?” said Lucas.

Casper swallowed. “None at all.” The last dose.

Emma squeezed the plunger, slowly emptying the contents of the syringe into her vein. She removed the needle, pressed gauze the puncture site, and folded her arm to hold it in place while she disposed of the needle. It felt like a sacred ceremony, every performed with reverence, with the solemn knowledge that this was the last time she would experience each sensation, from the prick of the needle, to the hard lump of gauze pressing into the flesh at the crook of her arm. And how long would this final dose of HCG keep her alive?

She turned and looked at the mouse cage, which she had moved into the Russian service module, where there was more light. The lone female was now curled in a shivering ball, dying.

The hormone’s effect was not permanent. The babies had died that morning. By tomorrow, thought Emma, I will be the only one alive aboard this station.

No, not the only one. There would be the life-form inside her.

The scores of larvae that would soon awaken from dormancy and begin to feed and grow.

She pressed her hand to her abdomen, like a pregnant woman sensing the fetus inside her. And like a real fetus, the life-form now harbored would carry bits and pieces of her DNA. In that way, it was her biological offspring, and it possessed the genetic of every host it had ever known. Kenichi Hirai. Nicolai Rudenko.

Diana Estes. And now, Emma.

She would be the last. There would be no new hosts, no new victims, because there would be no rescuers. The station was now a sepulcher of contagion, as forbidden and untouchable as a leper colony had been to the ancients.

She floated out of the RSM and swam toward the powered down section of the station. There was barely enough light to guide her through the darkened node. Except for the rhythmic sigh of her own breathing, all was silent on this end. She moved through the same molecules of air that had once swirled in the lungs of people now dead. Even now, she sensed the presence of the five who had passed on, could imagine the echoes of their voices, the last pulses of sound fracturing at last into silence.

This was the very through which they had moved, and it was still haunted by their passing.

And soon, she thought, it will be haunted by mine.

August 24

Jared Profitt was awakened just after midnight. It took only two rings of the phone to propel him from deep sleep to a state of complete alertness. He reached for the receiver.

The voice on the other end was brusque. “This is General Gregorian. I’ve just spoken to our control center in Cheyenne Mountain. That so-called demo launch from Nevada continues to be on a rendezvous path with ISS.”

“Which launch?”

“Apogee Engineering.” Profitt frowned, trying to remember the name.

Every week there were numerous launches from sites around the world. A score of commercial aerospace firms were always testing booster systems or sending satellites into orbit or even blasting off cremated human remains. Space Command was already tracking nine thousand manmade objects in orbit. “Refresh my memory about this Nevada launch,” he asked.

“Apogee is testing a new reusable launch vehicle. They sent it up at oh-seven-ten yesterday morning. They informed the FAA as required, but didn’t let us know until after the fact. This billed as an orbital trial of their new RLV. A launch into low orbit, a flyby past ISS, and then reentry. We’ve been tracking for a day and a half now, and based on its most recent on-orbit burns, it seems possible they’ll approach the station closer than they told us.”

“How close will they get?”

“It depends on their next burn maneuvers.”

“Close enough for an actual rendezvous? A docking?”

“That’s not possible with this particular vehicle. We have all the specs on their orbiter. It’s just a prototype, with no orbital system. The best it can do is a flyby and a wave.”

“A wave?” Profitt suddenly sat up in bed. “Are you telling me this RLV is manned?”

“No, sir. That was just a figure of speech. Apogee says the vehicle is unmanned. There are animals aboard, including a spider monkey, but no pilot. And we’ve picked up no voice communication between ground and vehicle.” A spider monkey, thought Profitt. Its presence aboard the spacecraft meant they could not rule out the possibility of a human pilot. The craft’s environmental monitors, the carbon dioxide levels, would not distinguish between animal or human life. He uneasy about the lack of information. He was even more uneasy about the timing of the launch. j L “I’m not certain there’s any cause for alarm,” said Gregorian.

“But you did ask to be notified of any orbital approaches.”

“Tell me more about Apogee,” Profitt cut in.

Gregorian gave a dismissive snort. “A minor player. Twelvemen engineering firm out in Nevada. They haven’t had a lot of luck. A year and a half ago, they blew up their first prototype twenty seconds into launch, and all their early investors vanished. I’m surprised they’re still hanging in there. Their booster’s based on Russian technology. The orbiter’s a simple, bare-bones system a parachute reentry. Payload capacity’s only three hundred kilos, plus a pilot.”

“I’ll fly out to Nevada at once. We need to get a better handle on this.”

“Sir, we can monitor every move this vehicle makes. Right now, we have no reason to take action. They’re just a small firm, to impress some new investors. If the orbiter presents any real concern, we can have our ground-based interceptors standing by to bring that bird down.” General Gregorian was probably right. The fact that some hotshot ground jockeys decided to launch a monkey into space did not constitute a national emergency. He had to move very carefully on this. The death of Luther Ames had unleashed a national uproar of protest. This was not the time to shoot down another spacecraft-one built by a private American firm, no less.