Mercury (30 page)

“You’re starting to come back to life,” the captain said after a pair of husky crewmen had pulled him off the bleeding prisoners. He made a strange, twisted smile. “You’re starting to feel pain again.”

“I’ve felt pain before,” Bracknell muttered as they trudged up the passageway toward the bridge.

“Maybe,” said the captain. “But now you can feel the demon gnawing at your guts. Now you know how I felt when they killed my wife. How I still feel.”

Bracknell stared at him with new understanding.

Back and forth through the Belt sailed
Alhambra,
and then set out on the long, tedious journey to Earth to deliver refined metals and pick up convicts. It seemed to Bracknell, when he thought about it, that there were always more convicts waiting to be sent out to the Belt, always more men and women who’d run afoul of the law. Teenagers, too. The governments of Earth had found a convenient way to get rid of troublemakers: dump them out in the Asteroid Belt. They must be making the laws tighter all the time, more restrictive, he thought. Or maybe they’re just using banishment to the Belt instead of other punishments.

On one of
Alhambra’s
stops at Earth, still another set of convicts was herded into the empty cargo hold—sixteen men and eleven women, most of them looking too frightened to cause any trouble. Only two of the bunch had been guilty of violent crimes: a strong-arm mugger and a murderer who had stabbed her boyfriend to death.

Bracknell was surprised, then, when the alarm hooted shortly after they had locked the prisoners in the hold. From his duty station on the bridge he looked over at the intercom screen. Two men were beating up a third, a tall, skinny scarecrow of a man. He saw their hapless victim trying to defend himself by wrapping his long arms around his head, but his two attackers knocked him to the metal deck with a rain of vicious body blows, then began kicking him.

“Get down there!” the captain snapped to Bracknell as he tapped on the controls set into the armrest of his command chair. Bracknell jumped up from his own seat, ducked through the hatch and sprinted toward the hold. He knew that the captain was dropping the air pressure in there hard enough to pop eardrums. They’ll all be unconscious by the time I get to the hold, he thought.

He could hear the footfalls of two other crewmen following him down the passageway. Stopping at the hatch only long enough to slip on the oxygen masks hanging on the wall, the three of them opened the hatch and pulled out three of the unconscious bodies: the bloodied scarecrow and his two attackers. Leaving the other crewmen to deal with the attackers, Bracknell picked up the victim and started running toward the infirmary. The man was as light as a bird, nothing but skin and bones.

Addie was waiting at the infirmary. She allowed Bracknell to lay the unconscious man on one of the two beds there as she powered up the diagnostic sensors built into the bulkhead.

“You should get back to the bridge,” she said to Bracknell as she began strapping the man down.

“As soon as he’s secure,” Bracknell said, fastening a strap across the man’s frail chest. “He’s a prisoner, after all.”

The man moaned wretchedly but did not open his eyes. Bracknell saw that they were both swollen shut, and his nose appeared to be broken. Blood covered most of his face and was spattered over his gray prison-issue coveralls.

“Go!” Addie said in an urgent whisper. “I can take care of him now.”

Bracknell headed back to the bridge. By the time he slid back into the chair before his console, he could see that the other convicts were stirring in the hold, regaining consciousness as the air pressure returned to normal. The two attackers were already sealed into hardshell space-suits and being dragged to an airlock.

“What started the fight?” he wondered aloud.

“What difference does it make?” the captain retorted. “It wasn’t much of a fight, anyway. Looked to me like those two gorillas wanted to beat the scarecrow to death. He probably tried to proposition them.”

Half an hour later Bracknell punched up the outside camera view. One of the spacesuited figures was floating inertly at the end of a buckyball tether. The other had crawled along the length of his tether and was pounding at the airlock hatch with a gloved fist.

“Too bad there’s no radio in his suit,” the captain remarked sourly. “I imagine we’d pick up some choice vocabulary.”

Once his shift was finished, Bracknell headed for his quarters. As he passed the open door of the infirmary, though, Addie called to him.

He stopped at the doorway and saw that she was at the minuscule desk in the infirmary’s anteroom, the glow from the desktop screen casting an eerie greenish light on her face.

“You were the chief of the skytower project, weren’t you,” Addie said. It was not a question.

His insides twitched, but Bracknell answered evenly, “Yes. And this is where it got me.”

“Permanently exiled from Earth.”

He nodded wordlessly.

Glancing over her shoulder at the open doorway to the infirmary’s beds, Addie said, “The man you brought in, he keeps mumbling something about the skytower.”

“Lots of people remember the skytower,” Bracknell said bitterly. “It was the biggest disaster in history.”

She shook her head. “But this man is not who he claims to be in his prison file.”

“What do you mean?”

“The patient in the infirmary,” she said, “keeps babbling about the skytower. He says they want to kill him because he knows about the skytower.”

“Knows what?”

Addie’s almond eyes were steady, somber. “I don’t know. But I thought that you would want to speak with him.”

“You’re damned right I do.”

She got up from the desk and Bracknell followed her into the infirmary. Her patient was asleep or unconscious as they squeezed into the cramped compartment. The other bed was unoccupied. Medical monitors beeped softly. The place had that sterile smell of antiseptics overlaying the metallic tang of blood.

Bracknell saw a tall, very slim, long-limbed man stretched out on the narrow infirmary bed. He was still in the clothes he’d been wearing when he’d been hurt: a pair of gray coveralls, wrinkled and dark with perspiration, spattered with his own blood. His face was battered, swollen, a bandage sprayed over one lacerated brow, another along the length of his broken nose. His body was immobilized by the restraining straps, and a slim plastic intravenous tube was inserted in his left forearm.

Addie called up the diagnostic computer and scans of the man’s body sprang up on the wall beside his bed.

“He has severe internal injuries,” she said, in a whisper. “They did a thorough job of beating him. A few more minutes and he would have died.”

“Will he make it?”

“The computer’s prognosis is not favorable. I have called back to Selene to ask for a medevac flight, but I doubt that they will go to the trouble for a prisoner.”

Bracknell asked, “What’s his name?”

“That’s just it,” she said, with a tiny frown that creased the bridge of her nose. “I’m not certain. His prison file shows him as Jorge Quintana, but when I ran a scan of his DNA profile the Earthside records came up with the name Toshikazu Koga.”

“Japanese?”

“Japanese descent, third generation American. Raised in Selene, where he graduated with honors in molecular engineering.”

Bracknell gaped at her. “Nanotechnology?”

“I believe so.”

Bracknell stared down at the unconscious convict. He did not look Asian, there were no epicanthic folds in his closed eyes. Yet there was an odd, unsettling quality about his face. The skin was stretched tight over prominent cheekbones and a square jaw that somehow looked subtly wrong for the rest of his face, as if someone had roughed it out and pasted it onto him. The color of his skin was strange, too, a mottled gray. Bracknell had never seen a skin tone like it.

He looked back at Addie. “Can you wake him up?”

“They’ll kill me sooner or later,” said Toshikazu Koga, his voice little more than a painfully labored whisper. “There’s no place left that I can run to.”

Bracknell was bending over his infirmary bed to hear him better. Addie sat on the other, unused bed.

“Who wants to kill you?” she asked. “Why?”

“The skytower—”

“What do you know about the skytower?” Bracknell demanded. “I was a loyal follower, a Believer…”

“What about the skytower?”

“I didn’t know. I should have guessed.” Toshikazu coughed. “Truth is, I didn’t want to know.”

It took all of Bracknell’s self-control to keep from grabbing the man by the shoulders and shaking his story out of him.

“What was it that you didn’t want to know?” Addie asked gently.

“All that money. They wouldn’t pay all that money for something legitimate. I should have refused. I should have…” His voice faded away.

“Damn!” Bracknell snapped. “He’s passed out again.”

Addie’s eyes flicked to the monitors on the wall. “We must let him rest.”

“But he knows something about the skytower! Something to do with nanotechnology and the tower.”

Getting up from the bed and looking him squarely in the eyes, Addie said, “We’ll learn nothing from him if he dies. Let him rest. Let me try to save his life.”

Knowing she was right despite his desperate desire to wring the truth out of the unconscious patient, Bracknell nodded tightly. “Let me know when he comes to.”

He got as far as the doorway to the anteroom, then turned. “And don’t let anyone else near him. No one!”

She looked alarmed at the vehemence of his command.

Little by little, in bits and pieces over the next two days, they wormed Toshikazu’s story out of him while Addie repeatedly called to Selene to beg for a medevac mission before
Alhambra
coasted too far from the Moon.

“The best I can do is stabilize him. He’ll die unless he gets proper medical help.”

Bracknell hoped he’d stay alive long enough to reveal what he knew about the skytower.

Toshikazu Koga had been an engineer in Selene’s nanotechnology laboratory, working mainly on nanomachines designed to separate pure metals out of the ores in asteroids. Instead of the rock rats digging out the ores and smelting them the old-fashioned way, nanomachines could pull out individual atoms of a selected metal while the human miners waited and watched from the comforts of their spacecraft.

Toshikazu was also a Believer, a devout, churchgoing member of the New Morality. Although his fellow churchgoers disapproved of nanotechnology, he saw nothing wrong with its practice on the Moon or elsewhere in space.

“It’s not like we’re on Earth, with ten billion people jammed in cheek by jowl,” he would tell those who scowled at his profession. “Here on the Moon nanomachines produce the air we breathe and the water we drink. They separate helium three from the regolith sands to power the fusion generators. And now I’m helping the miners in the Asteroid Belt, making their lives safer and more profitable.”

But there was another side to his nanotech work. His brother Takeo ran a lucrative clinic at the Hell Crater complex, where he used Toshikazu’s knowledge of nanotechnology for medical purposes. Because of his religious beliefs, Toshikazu felt uneasy about his brother’s using nanomachines to help rejuvenate aging men and women. Or for the trivial purposes of cosmetic surgery.

“Why use a scalpel or liposuction,” his brother would ask him, “when you can produce nanobugs that will tighten a sagging jawline or trim a bulging belly?”

Toshikazu knew that his brother was doing more than lifting breasts and buttocks. Men would come to him furtively, asking to have their faces completely changed. Takeo accepted their money and never asked why they wanted to alter their appearance. Toshikazu knew they were criminals trying to escape the law.

He was surprised, then, when a pair of churchmen visited him in his laboratory in Selene.

“At first I thought they wanted me to give them evidence against my brother,” he whispered painfully to Bracknell from his infirmary bed. “But no … it was worse than that…”

One of the churchmen was a high official of the New Morality. The other was a Chinese member of the Flower Dragon movement. What they wanted was a set of nanomachines that could destroy buckyball fibers.

Bracknell clutched at the injured man’s arm when he heard that, making him yowl so loud that Addie rushed in to see what had happened.

“You’ll kill him!” she screamed at Bracknell.

“I… I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

Toshikazu lay on the bed, his eyes glazed with pain. Addie demanded that Bracknell leave the infirmary.

“I’ll tell you when you can come back,” she said.

For a moment he thought he’d push her out of his way and get the rest of the story from the injured man. Then he took a deep breath and wordlessly left the infirmary.

All that night his mind seethed with what Toshikazu was telling him. He checked in at the infirmary on his way to the bridge the next morning, but Addie would not let him past the anteroom. “Let him rest,” she said. “He’ll be no use to you dead.”

Bracknell could hardly keep his attention on his duties. The captain snarled at him several times for his mental lapses. Then a message came in from another vessel, a Yamagata torch ship named
Hiryu.
Bracknell saw on the comm console’s main screen an aged Japanese man with long snow-white hair flowing past his shoulders.

“We have heard your call for a medical evacuation,” said the white-haired man. “We can reach you in six hours and evacuate your injured prisoner.”

Bracknell was tempted to tell the man not to bother; he didn’t want Toshikazu removed from
Alhambra
until he’d gotten his full story out of him. But, feeling the captain’s eyes on his back, he dutifully switched the call to the captain’s screen. In two minutes they had agreed for
Hiryu
to pick up the convict and ferry him back to Selene’s medical center.