Read Online Gravity by Tess Gerritsen - Free Book Online

with the possibilities. He shook his head.
    She accepted his answer with a chilly nod and a look that said, I can be every bit as detached as you are. Already she was withdrawing from him, turning to leave.
    “Emma.” He reached for her arm and gently tugged her around to face him.
    “I’ll miss you.”
    She sighed. “Sure, Jack.”
    “I really will.”
    “Weeks go by without a single call from you. And now you say you’re going to miss me.” She laughed.
    He was stung by the bitterness in her voice. And by the truth of her words. For the past few months he had avoided her. It had been painful to be anywhere near her because her success only magnified his own sense of failure.
    There was no hope of reconciliation, he could see that now, in the coolness of her gaze. Nothing left to do but be civilized it.
    He glanced away, suddenly unable to look at her. “I just came by to wish you a safe trip. And a great ride. Give me a wave so often, when you pass over Houston. I’ll watch for you.” A moving star was what ISS would look like, brighter than Venus, hurtling through the sky.
    “You wave too, okay?” They both managed a smile. So it would be a civilized parting after all. He held open his arms, and she leaned toward him for hug. It was a brief and awkward one, as though they were coming together for the first time. He felt her body, so warm and alive, press against him. Then she pulled away and started toward the Mission Control building.
    She paused only once, to wave good-bye. The sunlight was sharp in his eyes, and squinting against its brightness, he saw only as a dark silhouette, her hair flying in the hot wind. And knew that he had never loved her as much as he did at that very moment, watching her walk away.

July 19
    Cape Canaveral Even from a distance, the sight took Emma’s breath away. Poised on launchpad 39B, awash in brilliant floodlights, the shuttle Atlantis, mated to its giant orange fuel tank and the paired solid rocket boosters, was a towering beacon in the blackness of night.
    No matter how many times she experienced it, that first glimpse of a shuttle lit up on the pad never failed to awe her.
    The rest of the crew, standing beside her on the blacktop, were equally silent. To shift their sleep cycle, they’d awakened at that morning and had emerged from their quarters on the third floor of the Operations and Checkout building to catch a nighttime glimpse of the behemoth that would carry them into space. Emma heard the cry of a night bird and felt a cool wind blow in from the Gulf, freshening the air, sweeping away the stagnant scent of the wetlands surrounding them.
    “Kind of makes you feel humble, doesn’t it?” said Commander Vance in his soft Texas drawl.
    The others murmured in agreement.
    “Small as an ant,” said Chenoweth, the lone rookie on the crew.
    This would be his first trip aboard the shuttle, and he was so excited he seemed to generate his own field of electricity. “I forget how big she is, and then I take another look at her and I think, Jesus, all that power. And I’m the lucky son of a bitch gets to ride her.” They all laughed, but it was the hushed, uneasy laughter of parishioners in a church.
    “I never thought a week could go by so slowly,” said Chenoweth.
    “This man’s tired of being a virgin,” said Vance.
    “Damn right I am. I want up there.” Chenoweth’s gaze lifted hungrily to the sky. To the stars. “You guys all know the secret, I can’t wait to share it.” The secret. It belonged only to the privileged few who had made the ascent. It wasn’t a secret that could be imparted to another, you yourself had to live it, to see, with your own eyes, blackness of space and the blue of earth far below. To be pressed backward into your seat by the thrust of the rockets. Astronauts returning from space often wear a knowing smile, a look that says, I am privy to something that few human beings will ever know.
    Emma had worn such a smile when she’d