Mercury (24 page)

Lying flat on the tiles of the airport men’s room, Bracknell felt the floor jump as a roll of thunder boomed over them, so loud that his ears rang. Even so, he heard screams and terrified cries.

“Are you all right?” he asked Lara, his voice sounding strange, muffled, inside his head.

She nodded weakly. He saw that her nose was bleeding slightly. Bracknell climbed slowly to his feet. The old man was still lying on the floor, facedown. Bracknell called to him, then nudged his shoulder. The man did not move. Rolling him over, Bracknell saw his soft brown eyes staring out sightlessly.

“He’s dead,” Lara said. Bracknell could barely hear her over the buzzing in his head.

Feeling stunned, thick-witted, Bracknell gazed around the windowless men’s room. One of the tiled walls had cracked. Or had it been that way when they had rushed in here?

“Dead?” he echoed numbly.

“A heart attack, maybe,” Lara said. She clung close to Bracknell. He could feel her trembling.

“He’s lucky,” said Bracknell.

It took three days before they arrested Bracknell. He had made his way back to the shattered ruins of the Sky City, fighting through the panicked crowd at the airport, holding Lara close to him. The vast parking lot outside the airport seemed undamaged, except for the gritty dust that covered everything and crunched under their feet as they walked, tottering, for what seemed like hours until they found the minivan sitting there where they’d left it. Other people were milling around the parking lot, looking dazed, shocked.

A pall of smoke was rising from the city. Soon enough the looting would begin, Bracknell realized. For the moment they’re too stunned to do much of anything, but that’ll pass and they’ll start looting and stealing. And raping.

The minivan looked as if it had gone a thousand klicks without being washed. Bracknell helped Lara into the right-hand seat, then went around and got in himself. The car started smoothly enough. He used the windshield wipers to clear away enough of the dust so he could see to drive, then started slowly out toward the road that led back up into the hills. A few people waved pathetically to him, seeking a ride. To where? Bracknell asked himself silently as he drove past them, accelerating now. A couple of young men trotted toward the minivan and he pushed the accelerator harder. The toll gate at the exit was unoccupied, its arm raised, so he drove right through. In the rear mirror he saw a uniformed guard or policeman or something waving angrily at him. He drove on.

When they finally reached Ciudad de Cielo, they saw that most of it was flattened. Buildings were crushed beneath the skytower’s fallen bulk or blown flat by the shock wave of its collapse. Trucks overturned, lampposts bent and twisted. Dust hung in the air and the stench of death was everywhere, inescapable.

For three days Bracknell and Lara did nothing but dig bodies out of the collapsed buildings of the base city. The tower lay across the ruins like an immense black worm, dead and still, strangely warm to the touch. It had ripped out of all but one of its base tethers. In a distant corner of his mind Bracknell thought that they had designed the tethers pretty well to stand up even partially to the stress.

He worked blindly, numbly, side by side with the few surviving technicians, clerks, maintenance people, cooks, and others who had once been a proud team of builders. Lara worked alongside him, never complaining, like Bracknell and all the others too tired and shocked and disheartened to do much of anything except scrabble in the debris, eat whatever meager rations they could find, and sleep when they were too tired to stand any longer. Grimy, her face smeared with soot, her fingers bloody from digging, her clothes sodden with perspiration, Lara still worked doggedly at rescuing the few who were still alive and dragging out the mangled bodies of the dead.

The third night they saw torches lining the road from Quito, heading toward them.

“Volunteers?” Lara asked, her voice ragged with exhaustion.

“More likely a lynch mob,” said Bracknell, getting up from the rubble he’d been digging in.

“Can you blame them?” said Danvers who was working beside them. “They’re coming to kill everyone here.”

“No,” Bracknell replied, standing up straighter. “It’s me they want. I’m the one responsible for this.”

Lara, her weariness suddenly forgotten, turned her smudged face to Danvers. “You’re a man of god! Do something! Talk to them! Stop them!”

Danvers looked terrified. “Me?”

“There’s no one else,” Lara insisted.

“I’ll go,” Bracknell said grimly. “I’m the one they want.”

“I’ll… I’ll go with you,” Danvers stammered.

“You stay here,” Bracknell said to Lara.

“The hell I will!”

“This is going to be ugly.”

“I’m going where you go, Mance.”

The three of them walked—tottered, really—down the rubble-strewn street to the main road, where the torch-waving mob was marching toward them. Farther down the road, Bracknell could see the headlights of approaching trucks.

The crowd was mainly young men, all of them looking tired and grimy, clothes torn, faces blackened with soot and dirt. They carried shovels, picks, planks of wood. Christ, they look like us, Bracknell said to himself. They’ve been digging for survivors, too.

Danvers fished a small silver crucifix out of his pocket and held it up. In the flickering torchlight it gleamed fitfully. The mob stopped uncertainly.

“My sons,” he began.

One of the men, taller than the others, his eyes glittering with anger and hatred, spat out a string of rapid Spanish. Bracknell caught his drift: We want the men who killed our families. We want justice.

Danvers raised his voice, “Do any of you speak English?”

“We want justice!” a voice yelled from the crowd.

“Justice is the Lord’s,” Danvers bellowed. “God will avenge.”

The crowd surged forward dangerously. Danvers backed up several steps. Bracknell saw that it was going to be no use. The trucks were inching through the rear of the mob now. Bringing reinforcements, he thought. He stepped forward. “I’m the one you want,” he said in Spanish. “I’m the man responsible.”

An older man scurried up to Bracknell and peered at him. Turning back to the others, he shouted, “This is he! This is the chief of the skytower!”

The mob flowed forward, surrounding Bracknell. Lara screamed as Danvers dragged her back into the shadows, toward safety. The leader of the mob spat in Bracknell’s face and raised his shovel high in the air.

A shot cracked through the night. Everyone froze into immobility. Bracknell could feel his heart pounding against his ribs. Then he saw soldiers pouring out of the trucks, each of them armed with assault rifles. An officer waved a pistol angrily and told the men of the mob to back away.

“This man is under arrest,” the officer announced loudly. “He is going to jail.”

Bracknell’s knees nearly gave way. Jail seemed much better than having his brains splattered with a shovel.

As the crisply uniformed soldiers with their polished helmets and loaded guns bundled Bracknell into one of the trucks, he thought, Of course. They need to blame someone for this catastrophe. Who else? I’m the one in charge. I’m the one at fault.

He was treated with careful respect, as if he were a vial of nitroglycerine that might explode if mishandled. They placed him in the prison hospital, where a team of physicians and psychologists diagnosed Bracknell as suffering from physical exhaustion and severe emotional depression. He was dosed with psychotropic drugs for five of the six months between his arrest and his trial. During those five months, he was allowed no visitors, no television, nor any contact with the outside world, although police investigators questioned him for hours each day.

Skytower Corporation declared bankruptcy. Its board of directors issued a statement blaming the tower’s collapse on the technical director who headed the construction project in Ecuador, the American engineer Mance Bracknell. Several of the board members fled to the lunar city of Selene, where Earthly legal jurisdiction could not reach them.

After five months of imprisonment Bracknell’s interrogators flushed his body of the drugs they had used on him and showed him the written record of his confession. He signed it without argument. Only then was he allowed to speak to an attorney whom the government of Ecuador had appointed to represent him. When Lara was at last allowed to visit him, he had only the haziest of notions about what had happened to him since his arrest. Physically he was in good condition, except that he had lost more than five kilos in weight, his deep tan had faded, and his voice had withered to a whisper. Emotionally he was a wreck.

“I’ll get you the best lawyers on Earth,” Lara told him urgently.

Bracknell shrugged listlessly. “What difference does it make?”

The whole world watched his trial, in the high court in what was left of Quito. The court building had escaped major damage, although there were still engineers who had been brought in from Brazil poking around the building’s foundations; most of the court’s high stately windows, blown out by the shock of the tower’s collapse, had been replaced by sheets of clear plastic.

Skytower Corporation dissolved itself in the face of trillions of dollars of damage claims. Bracknell was too guilt-ridden even to attempt to find himself a lawyer other than the government-appointed lackey. Lara coaxed a family friend to help represent him. The old man came out of retirement reluctantly and told Bracknell at their first meeting that his highest hope was to avoid the death penalty.

Lara was shocked. “I thought international law forbids the death penalty.”

“More than four million deaths are being blamed on you,” the old man said, frowning disapprovingly at Bracknell. “Mass murder, they’re calling it. They want to make an example of you.”

“Why not?” Bracknell whispered.

Although the trial took place in Quito, it was held under the international legal regime. Years earlier, Lara’s lawyer had helped to write the international legal regime’s guiding rules. That did not help much. Nor did Bracknell do much to help himself.

“It’s my fault,” he kept repeating. “My fault.”

“No, it isn’t,” Lara insisted.

“The structure failed,” he told Lara and her lawyer, time and again. “I was in charge of the project, so it’s my responsibility.”

“But you’re not to blame,” Lara insisted each time. “You didn’t deliberately destroy the tower.”

“I’m the only one left to blame,” Bracknell pointed out morosely. “All the others were killed in the collapse.”

“No, that’s not true,” said Lara. “Victor is in Melbourne. He’ll help you.”

At Lara’s importuning Molina flew in from Melbourne. Sitting between his two lawyers on the opening day of the trial, dressed in a state-provided suit and a stiffly starched shirt that smelled of detergent, Bracknell felt a flicker of hope when he saw his old friend enter the courtroom and sit directly behind him, beside Lara. But once the trial began, it became clear that nothing on Earth could save him…

The first witness called by the three-judge panel was the Reverend Elliott Danvers.

The prosecuting attorney was a slim, dark-haired Ecuadorian of smoldering intensity, dressed in a white three-piece suit that fit him without a wrinkle. The video cameras loved his handsome face with its dark moustache, and he knew how to play to the vast global audience watching this trial. To Bracknell he looked like a mustachioed avenging angel. He started by establishing Danvers’s position as spiritual advisor to the people of Ciudad de Cielo.

“Most of them are dead now, are they not?” asked the prosecutor. Since the trial was being held under the international legal regime, and being broadcast even to Selene and the mining center at Ceres, it was conducted in English.

Danvers answered with a low “Yes.”

The prosecutor smoothed his moustache as he gazed up at the cracks in the courtroom’s coffered ceiling, preparing dramatically for his next question. “You were troubled by what you learned about this construction projection, were you not?”

Bit by bit, the prosecutor got Danvers to tell the judges that Bracknell had been using genetically engineered microbes as nanomachines to produce the tower’s structural elements.

The state-appointed defense attorney said nothing, but the lawyer that Lara had hired rose slowly to his feet and called in a tired, aged voice, “Objection. There is nothing illegal about employing genetically engineered microbes. And referring to them as ‘nanomachines’ is prejudicial.”

The judges conferred in hurried whispers, then upheld the objection.

The prosecutor smiled thinly and bowed his head, accepting their decision, knowing that the dreaded term would be remembered by everyone.

“Have such genetically engineered microbes been used in any other construction projects?”

Danvers shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I’m not an engineer…”

“To the best of your knowledge.”

“To the best of my knowledge: no, they have not. The project’s biologist, Dr. Molina, seemed quite proud of the originality of his work. He had applied for a patent.”

The prosecutor turned toward Bracknell with a thin smile. “Thank you, Rev. Danvers.”

Bracknell’s defense attorney got to his feet, glanced at the state-appointed attorney, then said, “I have no questions for this witness at this time.”

Lara, sitting behind Bracknell, touched his shoulder. He turned to her, saw the worried look on her face. And said nothing. Molina, sitting beside her, looked impatient, uncomfortable.

“I call Dr. Victor Molina to the stand,” said the prosecutor, with the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat.

Molina got to his feet and walked slowly to the witness chair; he tried to make a smile for Bracknell but grimaced instead.