“We’ve got to get going, sir,” said the copilot. “So if you buckle right in.” Jack took a window seat near the front of the plane.

Roy Bloomfeld was the last to step aboard, his bright red hair stiff from the wind. As soon as Bloomfeld took his seat, they closed the hatch.

“Todd isn’t coming?” asked Jack.

“He’s manning the console for landing. Looks like we’re gonna be the shock troops.” The plane began to taxi out onto the runway. They could waste no time, it was an hour-and-a-half flight to White Sands.

“You know what’s going on?” Jack asked. “Cause I’m in the dark.”

“I got a brief rundown. You know that spill they had on Discovery yesterday? The one they’ve been trying to identify? Turns out it was fluids leaking from Kenichi Hirai’s body bag.”

“That bag was sealed tight. How did it leak?”

“Tear in the plastic. The crew says the contents seem to be under pressure. Some sort of advanced decomposition going on.”

“Kittredge described the fluid as green and only mildly fishy smelling. That hardly sounds like fluid from a decomposing corpse.”

“We’re all puzzled. The bag’s been resealed. We’ll have to wait till they land to find out what’s going on inside. It’s the first we’ve dealt with human remains in microgravity. Maybe there’s something different about the process of decomposition. Maybe the anaerobic bacteria die off, and that’s why it’s not giving off odors.”

“How sick is the crew?”

“Both Hewitt and Kittredge are complaining of severe headaches. Mercer’s throwing up like a dog now, and O’Leary’s got abdominal pain. We’re not sure how much of it is psychological. There’s gotta be an emotional reaction when you’ve been gulping in a decomposing colleague.”

Psychological factors certainly complicated the picture. Whenever there is an outbreak of food poisoning, a significant percentage of victims are, in fact, uninfected. The power of suggestion is so strong it can produce vomiting as severe as any real illness.

“They had to put off the undocking. White Sands has been having problems too. One of their TACANS was transmitting erroneous signals. They needed a few hours to get it up and functioning again.” The TACAN, or tactical air navigation locating system, was a series of ground transmitters that provided the orbiter with updates on its navigation-state vector. A bad TACAN signal could cause the shuttle to miss the runway entirely.

“Now they’ve decided they can’t wait,” said Bloomfeld. “In just the last hour, the crew’s gotten sicker. Kittredge and Hewitt have scleral hemorrhages. That’s how it started with Hirai.” Their plane began its takeoff roll. The roar of the engines filled their ears, and the ground dropped away.

Jack yelled over the noise, “What about ISS? Is anyone sick on the station?”

“No. They kept the hatches closed between vehicles to contain the spill.”

“So it’s confined to Discovery?”

“So far as we know.” Then Emma’s okay, he thought, releasing a deep breath.

Emma’s safe. But if a contagion had been brought aboard Discovery inside Hirai’s corpse, why wasn’t the space station crew infected as well?

“What’s the shuttle’s ETA?” he asked.

“They’re undocking now. Burn target’s in forty-five minutes, and touchdown should be around seventeen hundred.” Which didn’t give the ground crew much time to prepare. He stared out the window as they broke through the clouds into a golden bath of sunlight. Everything is working against us, he thought. An emergency landing. A broken TACAN shack. A sick crew.

And it will all come together on a runway in the middle of nowhere.

Jill Hewitt’s head hurt, and her eyeballs were aching so badly she could barely focus on the undocking checklist. In just the last hour pain had crept into every muscle of her body, and now it felt as if jagged bolts were ripping through her back, her thighs. Both her sclerae had turned red, so had Kittredge’s. His eyeballs looked like twin bags of blood. Glowing. Red. He was in pain too, she could see it in the way he moved, the slow and guarded turning of his head. They were both in agony, yet neither of them dared accept an injection of narcotics. Undocking and landing required peak alertness, and they could not risk losing even the slightest edge of performance.

Get us home. Get us home. That was the mantra that kept running through Jill’s head as she struggled to stay on task, as sweat drenched her shirt and the pain ate into her concentration.

They were racing through the departure checklist. She had plugged the IBM Thinkpad’s computer cable into the aft console data port, booted up, and opened the Rendezvous and Proximity Operations program.

“There’s no data flow,” she said.

“What?”

“The port must be gunked up by the spill. I’ll try the middeck PCMMU.” She unplugged the cable. Every bone in her face screamed with pain as she made her way through the interdeck access, carrying the Thinkpad.

Her eyes were throbbing so badly they felt as if they were about to pop out of their sockets. Down middeck, she saw Mercer was already dressed in his launch-and-entry suit and strapped in for reentry. He was unconscious—probably from the dose of narcotics. O’Leary, also strapped in, was awake but looking dazed. Jill floated across to the middeck data port and plugged in the Thinkpad.

Still no data stream.

“Shit. Shit.” Now struggling to focus, she made her way back to the flight deck.

“No luck?” said Kittredge.

“I’ll change out the source cable and try this port again.” Her head was pounding so badly now it brought tears to her eyes. Teeth gritted, she pulled out the cable, replaced it with a new one. Rebooted. From Windows, she opened RPOP. The Rendezvous and Proximity Operations logo appeared on the screen.

Sweat broke out on her upper lip as she began to type in the mission elapsed time. Days, hours, minutes, seconds. Her reflexes weren’t obeying as they should. They were sluggish, clumsy. She had to back up to correct the numbers. At last she selected

“Prox Ops” and clicked on

“OK.”

“RPOP initialized,” she said with relief. “Ready to process data.

Kittredge said, “Capcom, are we go for sep?”

“Stand by, Discovery.” The wait was excruciating. Jill looked down at her hand and saw that her fingers had started to twitch, that the muscles of her forearm were contracting like a dozen writhing worms beneath the skin. As if something alive were tunneling through her flesh. She fought to keep her hand steady, but her fingers kept twitching in electric spasms. Get us home now. While we can still fly this bird.

“Discovery,” said Capcom. “You are a go for undocking.”

“Roger that. Digital autopilot on low Z. Go for undocking.” Kittredge shot Jill a look of profound relief. “Now let’s get the hell home,” he muttered, and grasped the hand controls.

Flight Director Randy Carpenter stood like the statue of Colossus, his gaze fixed on the front screen, his engineer’s brain coolly monitoring simultaneous streams of visual data and loop conversations.

As always, Carpenter was thinking several steps ahead. The docking base was now depressurized. The latches connecting the to ISS would unhook, and preloaded springs in the docking system would gently push the two vehicles apart, causing them to free away from each other. Only when they were two feet apart would Discovery’s RCS jets be turned on to steer the orbiter away. At point in this delicate sequence of events, things could go wrong, but for every possible failure, Carpenter had a contingency plan. the docking latches failed to unhook, they’d fire pyrotechnic charges and shear off the latch retention bolts. If that failed, crew members from ISS could perform an EVA and manually remove the bolts. They had backup plans for backup plans, a contingency for every failure.