Gravity
Top Ten bestselling author Tess Gerritsen expands the scope of her landscape of terror in a thoroughly menacing new thriller. A brilliantly compulsive page-turner from the author of The Surgeon.Dr Emma Watson, a brilliant research physician, has been training for the mission of a lifetime: to study living organisms in space. Jack McCallum, Emma’s estranged husband, has shared her dream of space travel, but a medical condition has grounded him. Now he must watch from the sidelines…The mission aboard the space station turns into a nightmare when a culture of single-celled organisms begins to regenerate out of control – and infects the crew with agonising and deadly results. Emma struggles to contain the deadly virus, while back home Jack and NASA work against the clock to bring her home. But there will be no rescue, as the astronauts are left stranded in orbit where they are dying one by one…
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Gravity
Tess Gerritsen
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in the USA by Pocket Books 1999
Copyright © Tess Gerritsen 1999
Tess Gerritsen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006513087
Ebook Edition © JULY 2011 ISBN: 9780007370795 Version: 2016-10-05
To the men and women whohave made spaceflight a reality.
Mankind’s greatest achievements are launched on dreams.
Table of Contents
The Galápagos Rift
.30 Degrees South, 90.30 Degrees West
He was gliding on the edge of the abyss.
Below him yawned the watery blackness of a frigid underworld, where the sun had never penetrated, where the only light was the fleeting spark of a bioluminescent creature. Lying prone in the form-fitting body pan of Deep Flight IV, his head cradled in the clear acrylic nose cone, Dr Stephen D. Ahearn had the exhilarating sensation of soaring, untethered, through the vastness of space. In the beams of his wing lights he saw the gentle and continuous drizzle of organic debris falling from the light-drenched waters far above. They were the corpses of protozoans, drifting down through thousands of feet of water to their final graveyard on the ocean floor.
Gliding through that soft rain of debris, he guided Deep Flight along the underwater canyon’s rim, keeping the abyss to his port side, the plateau floor beneath him. Though the sediment was seemingly barren, the evidence of life was everywhere. Etched in the ocean floor were the tracks and plow marks of wandering creatures, now safely concealed in their cloak of sediment. He saw evidence of man as well: a rusted length of chain, sinuously draped around a fallen anchor; a soda pop bottle, half-submerged in ooze. Ghostly remnants from the alien world above.
A startling sight suddenly loomed into view. It was like coming across an underwater grove of charred tree trunks. The objects were blacksmoker chimneys, twenty-foot tubes formed by dissolved minerals swirling out of cracks in the earth’s crust. With the joysticks, he maneuvered Deep Flight gently starboard, to avoid the chimneys.
‘I’ve reached the hydrothermal vent,’ he said. ‘Moving at two knots, smoker chimneys to port side.’
‘How’s she handling?’ Helen’s voice crackled through his earpiece.
‘Beautifully. I want one of these babies for my own.’
She laughed. ‘Be prepared to write a very big check, Steve. You spot the nodule field yet? It should be dead ahead.’
Ahearn was silent for a moment as he peered through the watery murk. A moment later he said, ‘I see them.’
The manganese nodules looked like lumps of coal scattered across the ocean floor. Strangely, almost bizarrely, smooth, formed by minerals solidifying around stones or grains of sand, they were a highly prized source of titanium and other precious metals. But he ignored the nodules. He was in search of a prize far more valuable.
‘I’m heading down into the canyon,’ he said.
With the joysticks he steered Deep Flight over the plateau’s edge. As his velocity increased to two and a half knots, the wings, designed to produce the opposite effect of an airplane wing, dragged the sub downward. He began his descent into the abyss.
‘Eleven hundred meters,’ he counted off. ‘Eleven fifty…’
‘Watch your clearance. It’s a narrow rift. You monitoring water temperature?’
‘It’s starting to rise. Up to fifty-five degrees now.’
‘Still a ways from the vent. You’ll be in hot water in another two thousand meters.’
A shadow suddenly swooped right past Ahearn’s face. He flinched, inadvertently jerking the joystick, sending the craft rolling to starboard. The hard jolt of the sub against the canyon wall sent a clanging shock wave through the hull.
