Mercury (26 page)

“Take any seat you like, Mr. Bracknell,” said the taller of the two men.

“This flight is exclusively for you,” said the other, with a smirk. “Courtesy of Masterson Aerospace Corporation and the International Court of Justice.”

Bracknell fought down an urge to punch him in his smug face. He looked around the circular compartment, then chose one of the few seats that was next to a window. One of the soldiers sat next to him, the other directly behind him.

It took nearly half an hour before the Clippership was ready for launch. Bracknell saw there was a video screen on the seat back in front of him. He ignored its bland presentation of a Masterson Aerospace documentary and peered out the little window at the workers moving around the blast-blackened concrete pad on which the rocket vehicle stood. He heard thumps and clangs, the gurgling of what he took to be rocket propellant, then the screen showed a brief video about safety and takeoff procedures.

Bracknell braced himself for the rocket engines’ ignition. They lit off with a demon’s roar and he felt an invisible hand pressing him down into the thickly cushioned seat. The ground fell away and he could see the whole airport, then the towers and squares of Quito, and finally the long black snake of the fallen skytower lying across the hilly land like a dead and blasted dream.

It was only then that he burst into tears.

Although Bracknell’s Clippership ride from Quito to orbit was exclusively for him, the vehicle they transferred him to held many other convicts.

It was not a torch ship, the kind of fusion-driven vessel that could accelerate all the way out to the Belt and make it to Ceres in less than a week. Bracknell was put aboard a freighter named
Alhambra,
an old, slow bucket that spent months coasting from Earth out to the Belt.

His fellow prisoners were mostly men exiled for one crime or another, heading for a life of mining the asteroids. Bracknell counted three murderers (one of them a sullen, drug-raddled woman), four thieves of various accomplishments, six embezzlers and other white-collar crooks, and an even dozen others who had been convicted of sexual crimes or violations of religious authority.

The captain of the freighter obviously did not like ferrying convicts to the Belt, but it paid more than going out empty to pick up ores. The prisoners were marched into the unused cargo hold, which had been fitted out with old, rusting cots and a row of portable toilets. It was big, bare metal womb with walls scuffed and scratched by years worth of heavy wear. The narrow, sagging metal-framed cots were bolted to the floor, the row of toilet cubicles lined one wall. As soon as the
Alhambra
broke orbit and started on its long, coasting journey to the Belt, the captain addressed his “passengers” over the ship’s video intercom.

“I am Captain Farad,” he announced. In the lone screen fixed high overhead in the hold, Bracknell and the others could see that the captain’s lean, sallow face was set in a sour, stubbly scowl that clearly showed his contempt for his “passengers.”

“I give the orders aboard this vessel and you obey them,” he went on. “If you don’t give me any trouble I won’t give you any trouble. But if you start any trouble, if you’re part of any trouble, if you’re just only
near
trouble when it happens, I’ll have you jammed into a spacesuit and put outside on the end of a tether and that’s the way you’ll ride out to Ceres.”

The convicts mumbled and glowered up at the screen. Bracknell thought that the captain meant every word of what he’d said quite literally.

Even with that warning, the journey was not entirely peaceful. There were no private accommodations for the convicts aboard the freighter; they were simply locked into the empty cargo hold. Within a day, the hold stank of urine and vomit.

Alhambra’s
living module rotated slowly at the end of a five-kilometer tether, with its logistics and smelting modules on the other end, so that there was a feeling of nearly Earth-level gravity inside. Meals were served by simple-minded robots that could neither be bribed nor coerced. Bracknell did his best to stay apart from all the others, including the women convicted of prostitution, who went unashamedly from cot to cot once the overhead lights had been turned down for the night.

Still, it was impossible to live in peace. His mind buzzed constantly with the memory of all he’d lost: Lara, especially. His dreams were filled with visions of the skytower collapsing, of the millions who had been killed, all of them rising from their graves and pointing accusing skeletal fingers at him. Where did it go wrong? Bracknell asked himself, over and over and over again. The questions tortured him. The structure was sound, he knew it was. Yet it had failed. Why? Had some unusually powerful electrical current in the ionosphere snapped the connector links at the geostationary level? Should I have put more insulation up at that level? What did I do wrong? What did I do?

It was his dreams—nightmares, really—that got him into trouble. More than once he was awakened roughly by one of the other convicts, angry that his moaning was keeping all those around his cot from sleeping.

“You sound like a fuckin’ baby,” snarled one of the angry men, “cryin’ and yellin’.”

“Yeah,” said another. “Shut your mouth or we’ll shut it for you.”

For several nights Bracknell tried to force himself to stay awake, but eventually he fell asleep and once he did his haunting dreams returned.

Suddenly he was being yanked off his cot, punched and kicked by a trio of angry men. Bracknell tried to defend himself, he fought back and unexpectedly found himself enjoying the pain and the blood and the fury as he smashed their snarling faces, grabbed a man by the hair and banged his head off the metal rail of his cot, kneed another in the groin and pounded him in the kidneys. More men swarmed over him and he went down, but he was hitting, kicking, biting, until he blacked out.

When he awoke he was strapped down in a bunk. Through swollen, blood-encrusted eyes he realized that this must be the ship’s infirmary. It smelled like a hospital: disinfectant and crisply clean sheets. No one else was in sight. Medical monitors beeped softly above his head. Every part of his body ached miserably. When he tried to lift his head a shock of pain ran the length of his spine.

“You’ve got a couple of broken ribs,” said a rough voice from behind him.

The captain stepped into his view. “You’re Bracknell, eh? You put up a good fight, I’ll say that much for you.” He was a small man, lean and lithe, his skin an ashen light tan, the stubble on his unshaved face mostly gray. A scar marred his upper lip, making him look as if he were perpetually snarling. His hair was pulled back off his face and tied into a little queue.

Bracknell tried to ask what happened, but his lips were so swollen his words were terribly slurred.

“I reviewed the fight on the video monitor,” the captain said, frowning down at him. “Infrared images. Not as clear as visible light, but good enough for the likes of you scum.”

“I’m not scum,” Bracknell said thickly.

“No? You killed more people than the guys who were pounding you ever did.”

Bracknell turned his head away from the captain’s accusing eyes.

“I was an investor in Skytower Corporation,” the captain went on. “I was going to retire and live off my profits. Now I’m broke. A lifetime’s savings wiped out because you screwed up the engineering. What’d you do, shave a few megabucks on the structure so you could skim the money for yourself?”

It was all Bracknell could do to murmur, “No.”

“Not much, I’ll bet.” The captain stared down at Bracknell, unconcealed loathing in his eyes. “The guys who jumped you are riding outside, just as I promised troublemakers would. You’d be out there, too, except I don’t have enough suits.”

Bracknell said nothing.

“You’ll spend the rest of the flight here, in the infirmary,” said the captain. “Think of it as solitary confinement.”

“Thanks,” Bracknell muttered.

“I’m not doing this for you,” the captain snapped. “Long as you’re in the hold with the rest of those savages you’re going to be a lightning rod. It’ll be a quieter ride with you in here.”

“You could have let them kill me.”

“Yeah, I could have. But I get paid for every live body I deliver at Ceres. Corpses don’t make money for me.”

With that, the captain left. Bracknell lay alone, strapped into the bunk. When his nightmares came there was no one to be bothered by his screams.

As the weeks dragged by, Bracknell’s ribs and other injuries slowly healed. The ship’s physician—an exotic-looking, dark-skinned young Hindu woman—allowed him to get up from the bunk and walk stiffly around the narrow confines of the infirmary. She brought him his meals, staring at him through lowered lashes with her big liquid eyes.

Once, when he woke up screaming in the middle of the night, the physician and the captain both burst into the tiny infirmary and sedated him with a hypospray. He slept dreamlessly for a day and a half.

After weeks of being tended by this silent physician with her almond eyes and subtle perfume, Bracknell realized, My god, even in a wrinkled, faded set of sloppy coveralls she looks sexy. He thought of Lara and wondered what she was doing now, how she was putting together the shattered pieces of her life. The physician never spoke a word to him and Bracknell said nothing to her beyond a half-whispered “Thank you” when she’d bring in a tray of food. The young woman was obviously wary of him, almost frightened. If I touch her and she screams I’ll end up outside in a spacesuit, trying to stay alive on liquids and canned air, he told himself.

At last one day, when he was walking normally again, he blurted, “May I ask you something?”

She looked startled for a moment, then nodded wordlessly.

“Why put the troublemakers outside?” Bracknell asked. “Wouldn’t it be easier to dope them with psychotropics?”

The young woman hesitated a heartbeat, then said, “Such drugs are very expensive.”

“But I should think the government would provide them for security purposes, to keep the prisoners quiet.”

A longer hesitation this time, then, “Yes, they do. My father sells the drugs at Ceres. They fetch a good price there.”

“Your father?”

“The captain. He is my father.”

Holy lord! Bracknell thought. Good thing I haven’t touched her. I’d arrive in Ceres in a body bag.

The next morning the captain himself carried in his food tray and stayed to talk.

“She told you I’m her father,” he said, standing by the bunk as Bracknell picked at the tray on his lap.

“She reports everything to you, doesn’t she?” Bracknell replied.

“She doesn’t have to. I watch you on the monitor when she’s in here.”

“Oh. I see.”

“So do I. Every breath you draw. Remember that.”

“She doesn’t look like you.”

The captain’s scarred lip curled into a cold sneer. “Her mother was a Hindu. Met her in Delhi when I was running Clipperships there from the States. Once her parents found out she had married a Muslim they threw her out of their home.”

“You’re a Muslim?”

“All my life. My father and his father, too.”

“And you married a Hindu.”

“In India. Very tight situation. I wanted to take her back to the States but she was trying to get her parents to approve of our marriage. They wouldn’t budge. I knew that, but she kept on trying.”

“Is your wife on the ship, too?”

Without even an eyeblink’s hesitation the captain answered, “She was killed in the food riots back in ’sixty-four. That’s where I got this lip.”

Bracknell didn’t know what to say. He stared down at his tray.

“My daughter says I shouldn’t be so hard on you.”

Looking up into the captain’s cold stone gray eyes, Bracknell said, “I think you’ve been treating me pretty well.”

“Do you.”

“You could have let them kill me, back in the hold.”

“And lost the money I get when I deliver you? No way.”

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Bracknell picked up his plastic fork. Then a question arose in his mind.

“How did you break up the fight? I mean, how’d you stop them from killing me?”

With a sardonic huff, the captain said, “Soon’s the automated alarm woke me up and I looked at the monitor, I turned down the air pressure in the hold until you all passed out. Brought it down to about four thousand meters’ equivalent, Earth value.”

Bracknell couldn’t help grinning at him. “Good thing none of those guys were from the Andes.”

“I’d’ve just lowered the pressure until everybody dropped,” the captain evenly. “Might cause some brain damage, but I get paid to deliver live bodies, regardless of their mental capacities.”

Alhambra
arrived at Ceres at last and Bracknell was marched with the other convicts through the ship’s airlock and into the
Chrysalis II
habitat.

The mining community that had grown at Ceres had built the habitat that orbited the asteroid. It was a mammoth ring-shaped structure that rotated so that there was a feeling of gravity inside: the same level as the Moon’s, one-sixth of Earth normal.

Stumbling, walking haltingly in the unaccustomedly low gravity, the twenty-six men and women were led by a quartet of guards in coral-red coveralls into what looked to Bracknell like an auditorium. There was a raised platform at one end and rows of seats along the carpeted floor. The guards motioned with their stun wands for the prisoners to sit down. Most of them took seats toward the rear of the auditorium while the guards stationed themselves at the exits. Bracknell went down to the third row; no one else had chosen to sit so close to the stage.

For a few minutes nothing happened. Bracknell could hear half-whispered conversations behind him. The auditorium looked clean, sparkling, even though its walls and ceiling were bare tile. It even smelled new and fresh, although he realized the scent could be piped in through the air circulation system.