So she would never return. She was an astronaut ghost now, still a member of the corps, but without hope of any flight assignment.

It was up to others to pursue the dream. Already, a new team was aboard the station, completing the repairs and biological cleanup that she and Jack had begun. Next month, the last replacement for the damaged main truss and solar arrays would be launched aboard Columbia. ISS would not die. Too many lives had been lost to make an orbiting station a reality, to abandon it now would be render that sacrifice meaningless.

Another shooting star streaked overhead, tumbled like a dying cinder, and winked out. They both waited, hoping, for another.

Other people who saw falling stars might think them omens, or angels winging from heaven, or consider them occasions to make a wish. Emma saw them for what they were, bits of cosmic debris, wayward travelers from the cold, dark reaches of space. That they were nothing more than rocks and ice did not make them any less wondrous.

As she tilted her head back and scanned the heavens, Sanneke rose upon a swell, and she had the disorienting impression that stars were rushing toward her, that she was hurtling through space and time. She closed her eyes. And without warning, her heart began to pound with inexplicable dread. She felt the icy kiss of sweat on her face.

Jack touched her trembling hand. “What’s wrong? Are you cold?”

“No. No, not cold…” She swallowed hard. “I suddenly thought of something terrible.”

“What?”

“If USAMRIID’s right—if Chimera came to earth on an asteroid—then that’s proof other life is out there.”

“Yes. It would prove it.”

“What if it’s intelligent life?”

“Chimera’s too small, too primitive. It’s not intelligent.”

“But whoever sent it here may be,” she whispered.

Jack went very still beside her. “A colonizer,” he said softly.

“Like seeds cast on the wind. Wherever Chimera landed, on any planet, in any solar system, it would infect the native species. Incorporate their DNA into its own genome. It wouldn’t need millions of years of evolution to adapt to its new home. It could acquire all the genetic tools for survival from the species already living there.” And once established, once it became the dominant species on its new planet, what then? What was its next step? She didn’t know. The answer, she thought, must lie in the parts of Chimera’s genome they could not yet identify. The sequences of DNA whose function remained a mystery.

A fresh meteor streaked the sky, a reminder that the heavens are ever-changing and turbulent. That the earth is only one lonely traveler through the vastness of space.

“We’ll have to be ready,” she said. “Before the next Chimera arrives.” Jack sat up and looked at his watch. “It’s getting cold,” he said.

“Let’s go home. Gordon will go ballistic if we miss that press conference tomorrow.”

“I’ve never seen him lose his temper.”

“You don’t know him the way I do.” Jack began to haul on the halyard, and the main sail rose, flapping in the wind. “He’s in love with you, you know.”

“Gordie?” She laughed. “I can’t imagine.”

“And you know what I can’t imagine?” he said softly, pulling her close beside him in the cockpit. “That any man wouldn’t be.” The wind suddenly gusted, filling the sail, and Sanneke-surged ahead, slicing through the waters of Galveston Bay.

“Ready about,” said Jack. And he steered them through the wind, turning the bow west. Guided not by the stars, but by the lights shore.

The lights of home.