Mercury (34 page)

“Like I’m being eaten inside,” Bracknell snapped.

Takeo tilted his head slightly. “Can’t be helped. Normally we go more slowly, but both of us are in a hurry so I’ve given you some pretty heavy dosages.”

“I don’t see any change,” said Bracknell.

“Don’t you?” Takeo smiled condescendingly. “I do.”

“My face is the same.”

Walking over to the desktop phone, Takeo said, “The day-to-day change is minuscule, true enough.” He spoke a command in Japanese to the phone. “But a week’s worth of change is significant.”

Bracknell saw his own image on the phone’s display.

“Take a look in the mirror,” said Takeo.

Bracknell went to the bathroom. He stared, then ducked back into the living room. The difference was subtle, but clear.

Takeo smiled at his handiwork. “In another week not even United Life and Accident Assurance will be able to tell you from the original Dante Alexios.”

“It’s painful,” Bracknell said.

“Having your bones remolded involves some discomfort,” Takeo replied, unconcerned. “But you’re getting a side benefit: you’ll never have to shave again. I’ve eliminated the hair follicles on your face.”

“It still hurts like hell.”

Takeo shrugged. “That’s the price you must pay.”

Another week, thought Bracknell. I can put up with this for another week.

Marvin Pratt frowned at the dark-haired man sitting in front of his desk. The expression on the stranger’s face was utterly serious, determined.

“You’re not the man I saw in the hospital,” he said.

“I am Dante Alexios,” said Bracknell. “I’ve come to claim my money as the sole beneficiary of the
Alhambra’s
accident policy.”

“Then who was the man in the hospital?” Pratt demanded.

Alexios shrugged his shoulders. They were slimmer than Bracknell’s had been. “Some derelict, I suppose.”

“He disappeared,” Pratt said, suspicion etched onto his face. “Walked out of the hospital and disappeared.”

“As I said, a derelict. I understand there’s an underground community of sorts here in Selene. Criminals, homeless people, all sorts of oddballs hiding away in the tunnels.”

Pratt leaned back in his swivel chair and let air whistle softly between his teeth as he compared the face of the man sitting before him with the image of Dante Alexios on his desktop screen. Both had pale skin and dark hair; the image on the screen had a shadow of stubble along his jaw while the man facing him was perfectly clean-shaven. His face seemed just a trifle out of kilter, as if the two halves of it did not quite match. His smile seemed forced, twisted. But the retinal patterns of his dark brown eyes matched those on file in the computer. So did his fingerprints and the convolutions of his ears.

“How did you survive the explosion?” Pratt asked, trying to keep his tone neutral, nonaccusative.

Smoothly, Alexios replied, “I was outside doing routine maintenance on the attitude thrusters when the two ships blew up. I went spinning off into space for several days. I nearly died.”

“Someone picked you up?”

“Another freighter, the
Dubai,
outbound for the Belt. After eight days they transferred me to an inbound ship, the
Seitz,
and I arrived here in Selene yesterday. That’s when I called your office.”

Pratt looked as if he didn’t believe a word of it, but he went through the motions of checking Alexios’s story. Alexios had paid the captains of the two vessels handsomely for their little lies, using Takeo’s money on the promise that he’d repay the physician once he got the insurance payout into his hands.

“This other man, the amnesiac,” said Pratt warily. “He was rescued from the
Alhambra
also.”

Smoothly, Bracknell answered, “Then he must have been a convict. Captain Farad had the pleasant little trick of putting troublemakers outside, in spacesuits, until they learned to behave themselves.”

“I see.” At last Pratt said, “You’re a very fortunate man, Mr. Alexios.”

“Don’t I know it!”

With a look of utter distaste, Pratt commanded his phone to authorize payment to Dante Alexios.

Alexios asked, “May I ask, how much is the, uh, benefit?”

Pratt glanced at his display screen. “Twelve point seven million New International Dollars.”

Alexios’s brows lifted. “That much?”

“What do you intend to do with your money?”

Taking a deep breath, Alexios said, “Well, there are some debts I have to pay. After that… I don’t know … I just might start my own engineering firm.”

He surprised Takeo by paying the physician’s normal fee for a cosmetic remake. Then Dante Alexios opened a small consulting engineering office in Selene. He started by taking on charity work and performing community services, such as designing a new water processing plant for Selene’s growing population of retirees from Earth. His first paying assignment was as a consultant on the new mass driver being built out on Mare Nubium to catapult cargos of lunar helium three to the hungry fusion power plants on Earth. He began to learn how to use nanotechnology. With a derisive grin he would tell himself, Damned useful, these little nanomachines.

In two years he was well known in Selene for his community services. In four he was wealthy in his own right, with enough contracts to hire a small but growing staff of engineers and office personnel. Often he thought about returning to Earth and looking up Lara, but he resisted the temptation. That part of his life was finished. Even his hatred of Victor and Danvers had abated. There was nothing to be done. The desire for vengeance cooled, although he still felt angry whenever he thought of their betrayal.

Instead of traveling to Earth, Dante Alexios won a contract to build a complete research station on Mars, a new base in the giant circular basin in the southern hemisphere called Hellas. He flew to Mars to personally supervise the construction.

He lived at the construction site, surrounded by nanotech engineers and some of the scientists who would live and work at the base once it was finished. He walked the iron sands of the red planet and watched the distant, pale Sun set in the cloudless caramel-colored sky. He felt the peace and harmony of this empty world, with its craggy mountains and rugged canyons and winding ancient river beds.

We haven’t corrupted this world, Alexios told himself. There are only a handful of humans here, not enough to tear the place apart and rebuild it the way we’ve done to Earth, the way we’re doing to the Moon.

Yet he knew he was a part of that process; he had helped to extend human habitation across the dead and battered face of the Moon. Mars was different, though. Life dwelled here. Once, a race of intelligent creatures built their homes and temples into the high crevasses in the cliffs. Alexios got permission from the scientists running the exploration effort to visit the ruins of their cliff dwellings.

Gone. Whoever built these villages, whoever farmed those valleys, they were all wiped out by an impersonal planetwide catastrophe that snuffed out virtually all life on the red planet, blew away most of its atmosphere, flash-froze this world into a dusty, dry global desert. The scientists thought the plain of Hellas held the key to the disaster that sterilized Mars sixty-five million years ago, the same disaster that wiped out the dinosaurs and half of all living species on Earth.

Alexios felt very humble when he stared through his spacesuit visor at the crumbling ruins of a Martian cliff dwelling. Life can be snuffed out so easily. Like a skytower falling, crushing the life out of millions, ending a lifetime of hope and work with a snap of destiny’s fingers.

He was mulling his own destiny when he returned to the base nearing completion at Hellas. As the rocket glider that carried him soared over the vast circular depression, Alexios looked through the thick quartz window with some pride. The base spread across several square kilometers of the immense crater’s floor, domes and tunnels and the tangled tracks of many vehicles. The work of my mind, he said to himself. The base is almost finished, and I did it. I created it. With a little help from my nanofriends. Like the skytower, taunted a voice in his mind.

That night, he lay in his bunk and watched the Earthside news broadcasts while the Martian wind moaned softly past the plastic dome that housed the construction crew. Then he saw an item that made him sit straight up in bed.

Saito Yamagata was going to start a project to build solar power satellites in orbit around the planet Mercury.

Yamagata! He’s come out of his so-called retreat in Tibet and he’s heading for Mercury.

Without a moment’s hesitation, without a heartbeat of reflection, Alexios decided he would go to Mercury, too. He owed Yamagata a death. And as he sat in his darkened bedroom, the flickering light from the video screen playing across his transformed features, he realized that he could pay back both Victor and Danvers, too.

All the old hatred, all the old fury, all the old seething acid boiled up anew in his guts. Alexios felt his teeth grinding together. I’ll make them pay, he promised himself. I had almost forgotten about them, about what they did to me and all those millions of others. Almost forgotten Addie and her father and the others aboard
Alhambra.
How easy it is to let a comfortable life swallow you up. How easy to let the blade’s edge go dull.

He threw back the bed covers and strode naked to his desktop phone. Yamagata. Molina. Danvers. I’ll get all three of them on that hellhole of a world, Mercury.

Sitting in his bare little office, Dante Alexios smiled bitterly to himself as the memories of his ten lost years came flooding back to him. He finished reading the report issued by McFergusen and his ICU committee and leaned back in his desk chair. They’ve worded it very diplomatically, Alexios thought as he read the final paragraph, but their meaning is clear.

The aforementioned tests unequivocally show that the rocks in question originated on Mars. While there is a vanishingly small chance that they were deposited on Mercury’s surface by natural processes, the overwhelming likelihood is that they were transported to Mercury by human hands. The discovery of biomarkers in these samples by V. Molina is not, therefore, indicative of biological activity on the planet Mercury.

Victor is wiped out, Alexios said to himself, with satisfaction. McFergusen won’t come right out and say it, but the implication is crystal clear: either Victor planted those rocks here himself, or he fell dupe to some prankster who did it. Either way, Victor’s reputation as a scientist is permanently demolished.

Laughing out loud, Alexios thought, Now it’s your turn, Danvers.

He put in a call to Molina, to start the process of destroying Bishop Elliott Danvers.

As he strode down the central corridor of the orbiting
Himawari,
heading toward Molina’s quarters, Alexios began to feel nervous. Lara will be there, he knew. She lives with him. Sleeps with him. They have an eight-year-old son. He worried that sooner or later she would see through his nanotherapy and recognize Mance Bracknell. Then he realized that even if she did it wouldn’t change anything.

Still, he hesitated once he arrived at the door to their stateroom, his fist in midair poised to knock. What will I do if she does recognize me? he asked himself. What will you do if she doesn’t? replied the scornful voice in his head.

He took a breath, then knocked. Lara opened the door immediately, as if she had been standing behind it waiting anxiously for him.

He had to swallow before he could say, “Hello, Mrs. Molina.”

“Mr. Alexios.” Her voice was hushed, apprehensive. “Won’t you come in?”

Feeling every fiber of his body quivering nervously, Alexios stepped into their compartment. Victor was sitting on the two-place sofa set against the far bulkhead, his head in his hands. The bed was neatly made up; everything in the stateroom seemed in fastidious order. Except for Molina: he looked a wreck, hair mussed, face ashen, a two-day stubble on his jaw, dark rings under his eyes.

Alexios relaxed somewhat. This isn’t going to be difficult at all. He’s ready to clutch at any straw I can offer.

Lara asked, “Can I get you something, Mr. Alexios?”

“Dante,” he said. “Please call me Dante.”

With a nod, she said, “Very well, Dante. A drink, maybe?”

His memory flashed a picture of all the times he and Lara had drunk together. She’d been partial to margaritas in the old days; Mance Bracknell had a taste for wine.

“Just some water, please,” he said.

“Fruit juice?” she suggested.

He almost shuddered with the recollection of the nanomachine-laden juice he had drunk in Koga’s clinic. “Water will be fine, thank you.”

Lara went to the kitchenette built behind a short bar next to the sofa. Alexios pulled up one of the plush chairs and sat across the coffee table from Molina.

“As I said on the phone, Dr. Molina, I’m here to help you in any way I can.”

Molina shook his head. “There isn’t anything you can do,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

“Someone set you up for this,” Alexios said gently. “If we can find out who did it, that would show everyone that you’re not at fault.”

Lara placed a tray of glasses on the coffee table and sat next to her husband. “That’s what I’ve been telling him. We can’t just take this lying down. We’ve got to find out who’s responsible for this.”

“What can you do?” Molina asked morosely.

Alexios tilted his head slightly, as if thinking about the problem. “Well… you said you received an anonymous call about the rocks.”

“Yes. Somebody left a message for me at my office on campus. No name. No return address.”

“And on the strength of that one call you came out here to Mercury?”

Anger flared in Molina’s eyes. “Don’t you start, too! Yes, I came here on the strength of that one call. It sounded too good to be ignored.”