Mercury (31 page)

“Hiryu,”
the captain muttered after the call was terminated. “That means ‘flying dragon’ in Japanese, I think.”

As soon as his shift was finished, Bracknell hurried down the passageway to the infirmary. Addie wasn’t in the anteroom; he saw her bending over Toshikazu’s bed. He could see from the tortured look on her face that something was very wrong.

“He’s dying,” she said.

“A ship is on its way to pick him up,” Bracknell said, torn between his need to hear Toshikazu’s full story and a humanitarian instinct to get proper medical care for the man. “It’ll be here in less than four hours.”

“Thank the gods,” breathed Addie.

“Is he awake?”

She nodded. Bracknell pushed past her to the injured man’s bedside. Toshikazu’s eyes were open, but they looked unfocused, dazed from the analgesics Addie had been pumping into him.

“I’ve got to know,” Bracknell said, bending over him. “What did those church people want from you? What did you do for them?”

“Gobblers,” Toshikazu whispered.

Bracknell heard Addie, behind him, draw in her breath. She knew what gobblers were. Nanomachines that disassembled molecules, tore them apart atom by atom. Gobblers had been used as murder weapons, ripping apart protein molecules.

“To break up the buckyball fibers of the skytower?” Bracknell asked urgently.

Toshikazu nodded and closed his eyes.

“Gobblers are illegal,” said Addie. “Even in Selene…”

“But you made them, didn’t you?” Bracknell said to Toshikazu.

He understood it all now. Gobblers tore apart the skytower’s structure at the geostationary level. That’s why the lower half of the tower collapsed while the upper half went spinning off into deep space. And the evidence was at the bottom of the Atlantic’s midocean ridge, being melted away by the hot magma boiling into the ocean water.

“I made … gobblers… for them,” Toshikazu admitted, his eyes still closed.

“You made the gobblers for the Flower Dragon people?” Bracknell asked. “Or for the New Morality?”

With a weary shake of his head, Toshikazu replied, “Neither. They were … merely the agents… for…”

“For who?”

“Yamagata.”

Bracknell gaped at the dying man. Yamagata Corporation. Of course! It would take a powerful interplanetary corporation to plan and execute the destruction of the skytower.

“Yamagata,” Toshikazu repeated. “I was the last… the last one to know…”

Addie looked up at Bracknell. “Now we know.”

“No!” said Toshikazu. “I’ve told you … nothing. Nothing. I died … without telling you … anything. If they thought you knew…”

His eyes closed. His head slumped to one side.

And Bracknell said, “Yamagata.”

Bracknell was still in the infirmary with Addie and the unconscious Toshikazu when the rescue team from
Hiryu
came in, led by Captain Farad. The elderly Japanese man was accompanied by two young muscular types, also Asian, who gently lifted Toshikazu onto a stretcher and carried him away.

The old man stayed and asked Addie for Toshikazu’s medical file. She popped the chip from the computer storage and handed it to him.

With a sibilant hiss of thanks, the old man pushed his long hair back away from his face and asked her, “Does this chip include audio data, perhaps?”

“Audio data?” asked Addie.

“You must have spoken to him extensively while he was under your care,” said the old man. “Are your conversations included in this chip?”

She glanced at Bracknell, who said, “He was unconscious most of the time. When he did talk, it was mostly rambling, incomprehensible.”

“I see.” The old man looked from Bracknell’s face to Addie’s and then back again. “I see,” he repeated.

Captain Farad, impatient as usual, asked, “Is there anything else you need?”

The old man stroked his chin for a moment, as though thinking it over. “No,” he said at last. “I believe I have everything I need.”

He left with the captain.

Addie broke into a pleased smile. “I think we saved his life, Mance.”

“Maybe,” Bracknell said, still gazing at the open hatch where the captain and the Japanese elder had left.

“There’s nothing more to do here,” said Addie. “I’m going to my quarters and take a good long shower.”

Bracknell nodded.

“Will you walk me home?” she asked, smiling up at him.

Her quarters were down the passageway; his own a dozen meters farther. When they got to her door, Addie clutched at his arm and tugged him into her compartment.

He began to protest, “Your father—”

“—Is busy seeing off the rescue team,” Addie interrupted. “And there are no cameras in my quarters; I’ve made certain of that.”

“But I shouldn’t be in here alone with you.”

“Are you afraid?” She grinned impishly.

“Damned right!”

The compartment was much like his own quarters: a bunk, a built-in desk and dresser, accordion-pleat doors for the closet and lavatory.

Addie touched the control panel on the wall and the overhead lights turned off, leaving only the lamp on the bedside table.

“Addie, this is wrong.” But he heard the blood pulsing through his body, felt his heart pounding.

She stood before him, smiling knowingly. “Don’t you like me, Mance? Not even a little?”

“It’s not that—”

“Today is my seventeenth birthday, Mance. I am legally an adult now. And rather wealthy, you know. I can control my own dowry now. I can make my own decisions.”

She reached up to the tab at the throat of her coveralls and slid the zipper all the way down to her crotch. She wasn’t wearing a bra, he saw. Her body was young and full and beckoning.

“I love you, Mance,” Addie murmured, stepping up to him and sliding her arms around his neck.

He clutched her and pulled her close and kissed her upturned face.

And heard the door behind him burst open with a furious roar from Captain Farad. Before Bracknell could turn to face her father, he felt the searing pain of a stun wand at full charge and blacked out as he slumped to the floor.

Aboard
Hiryu
the elderly Japanese assassin composed a final message to Nobuhiko Yamagata. He encrypted the video himself, a task which took no little time, even with the aid of the ship’s computer:

“Most illustrious master: The last individual is now in our care. He will be treated as required. Unfortunately, he has probably contaminated the vessel in which we found him. Therefore that vessel will be dealt with. This will be my last transmission to you or anyone in this life. Sayonara.”

When Bracknell came back to consciousness he was already in a hardshell suit, its helmet sealed to the neck ring. The captain was glaring at him, his eyes raging with fury.

“I told you to keep away from her!” he screamed at Bracknell, loud enough to penetrate the helmet’s thick insulation. “I
warned
you!”

“Where is she? What have you done—”

“She’s in her quarters, crying. She’ll get over it. I’ll have to marry her off sooner than I planned, but it’ll be better than having her throw herself at scum like you.”

Bracknell felt himself being hauled to his feet and realized there were at least two other crewmen behind him. His legs wouldn’t function properly; the stun wand’s charge was still scrambling his nervous system.

“Drag him down to the auxiliary airlock,” the captain snarled. “That goddamn
Hiryu
is still connected to the main lock.”

“But I didn’t do anything!” Bracknell protested.

“The hell you didn’t!”

Like a sack of limp laundry Bracknell was hauled along the passageway and into the airlock. The captain clipped a tether to the waist of his spacesuit and handed him the loose end.

“You can find a cleat for yourself and clip onto it. Otherwise you can float out to infinity, for all I care.”

Bracknell tottered uncertainly in the hard-shell suit. His legs tingled as if they’d been asleep. He’s going to kill me! he thought. I’m going to die out there! There’s no way I can survive in a suit all the way out to the Belt. Even if he sends out more air and food how can I—

The inner airlock hatch slammed shut and Bracknell felt through the thick soles of his boots the pump starting to chug the air out of the darkened metal chamber. In less than a minute the pump stopped and the outer hatch swung open silently.

Bracknell saw the cold distant stars staring at him. On unsteady legs still twitching from the stun charge, he clumped to the lip of the hatch. Peering out along the ship’s skin, he saw a set of cleats within arm’s reach. For a moment he thought of refusing to go outside. I’ll just stay here in the airlock, he told himself. Then he realized that the captain would simply have a few men suit up and throw him out, maybe without even the tether. So, like a man going through the motions of a nightmare, he attached the end of his tether to the nearest cleat and then stepped out into nothingness. The airlock hatch slid shut behind him.

He glided silently as the tether unreeled, then was pulled up short. A sardonic voice in his head mocked, You’re at the end of your tether. A helluva way to die. He realized that despite his contemplation of suicide, despite Addie’s tutoring him in the desirelessness of the Buddhist path, he very much wanted to live.

Why? Why not just open the seal of this helmet and end it all here and now? The answer rose in his mind like the fireball of a nuclear explosion: Vengeance. Victor and Danvers had betrayed him. And Yamagata was the biggest bastard of them all. Yamagata had brought down the skytower, and that had given Victor the opportunity to steal Lara from him.

Molina. Danvers. Yamagata. He would live to work his vengeance on them. But you won’t live long enough to succeed, that mocking inner voice told him.

Looking around as he floated in the emptiness he saw, on the far side of
Alhambra’s
curving hull, that the other ship was still linked. What was its name?
Hiryu,
the captain had said. Flying dragon. Why would it still be connected? If they intend to bring Toshikazu back to Selene they ought to light off as quickly as they can.

Then Bracknell remembered that
Hiryu
was a Yamagata vessel. And Yamagata certainly wasn’t here to help Toshikazu recover from his wounds.

The silent explosion blinded him, but it did not surprise him.

Whirling blindly through space, Bracknell knew for certain that he was a dead man now.

He could feel himself spinning giddily. The explosion must have torn my tether free of
Alhambra,
he thought. I’ll twirl like this forever. I’ll probably be the first man to reach Alpha Centauri, even though I’ll be too dead to know it.

Then the realization hit him. Addie! The captain. All the people on
Alhambra.
Did the bastards kill everybody? Madly he tried to paw at his tear-filled eyes; his gloved hands bumped into the thick quartz visor of his helmet. Blinking furiously, he tried to force his vision to return. All he saw was the searing after-image of the explosion’s fireball. They wouldn’t have blown up the whole ship, he said to himself. Why would they? They wanted Toshikazu and they got him. Why the explosion? An accident?

No, he realized. They suspected that Toshikazu had been talking to us. They wanted no witnesses, nobody left alive. Dead men tell no tales. Neither do dead women, even if they’re only seventeen years old. His eyes filled with tears again, but now he was sobbing for Addie, killed because of me. The final casualty of the skytower. They killed her and everybody else because of me.

Then he thought of Yamagata. I didn’t kill them, Bracknell reminded himself. He did. Yamagata. He’s back on Earth, living in luxury, with the blood of millions on his hands.

Slowly his vision returned. Eventually he could see the wreckage of
Alhambra
spreading outward like dandelion seeds puffed by the wind. It was dwindling, dwindling as he himself spiraled away through space.

Yamagata did this. Bracknell kept the image of Saito Yamagata in the forefront of his mind. It kept him alive, gave him a reason to keep on breathing. He had never met the mighty founder of Yamagata Corporation, but he had seen vids of the man on the news net. Yamagata was supposed to have retreated to some monastery in Tibet, Bracknell remembered, but the newscasters smugly reported that this was just a ruse. The old man was still running his interplanetary corporate maneuvers, they assured their watchers.

Saito Yamagata, Bracknell told himself as he tumbled endlessly through space. Saito Yamagata. When he finally lapsed into unconsciousness he was still burning with hatred of Saito Yamagata.

He opened his eyes and almost smiled. Bracknell found himself lying on an infirmary bed, safe and warm, with a crisp sheet over his naked body. It was all a dream, he thought. A nightmare.

But the dark-skinned, slightly plump nurse who stepped into his view was a stranger. And she wore a white uniform with the crescent logo of Selene on her left breast, just above a name tag that identified her as norris, g.

Bracknell blinked at her, then croaked, “Where am I?”

She smiled pleasantly at him, white teeth gleaming in her dark face. “A classic question.”

“But where—”

“You’re in the hospital at Selene. A salvage team picked you up when they went out to claim the wreck of
Alhambra.”

The nurse fussed over the intravenous drip inserted in Bracknell’s arm as she replied, “From what I hear,
Alhambra
collided with some Yamagata ship and they both blew up. You’re lucky to be alive.”

Raising his head anxiously, Bracknell asked, “Did anybody else … are there are any other…”

“No, you’re the only one who survived. What were you doing outside in a spacesuit?” Without waiting for an answer the nurse went on, “Whatever, it saved your life. Were you outside doing some repairs, or what?”