Mercury

LEAVING EARTH

They wasted no time hustling Bracknell off the planet. Within two days of his trial’s inevitable conclusion, a squad of hard-faced soldiers took him from his prison cell to a van and out to the Quito airport, where a Clippership was waiting to carry him into orbit.

The airport looked relatively undamaged, Bracknell saw from the window of the van, except for the big plywood sheets where the sweeping windows had been. It’s a wonder the crash didn’t trigger earthquakes, he thought.

The soldiers marched him through the terminal building, people turning to stare at him as they strode to the Clippership gate. Bracknell was not shackled, not even handcuffed, but everyone recognized him. He saw the look in their eyes, the expressions on their faces: hatred, anger, even fear—as if he were a monster that terrified their nightmares.

Lara was waiting at the terminal gate, wearing black, as if she were attending a funeral. She is, Bracknell thought. Mine.

She rushed to him and leaned her head against his chest. Bracknell felt awkward, with the grim-faced soldiers flanking him. He slid his arms around her waist hesitantly, tentatively, then suddenly clung to her like a drowning man clutching a life preserver.

“Darling, I’ll go out to the Belt with you,” Lara said, all in a gush. “Wherever they send you, I’ll go there too.”

He pushed her back away from him. “No! You can’t throw away your life. They’re putting me in some sort of a penal colony; you won’t be allowed there.”

“But I—”

“Go back home. Live your life. Forget about me. I’m a dead man. Dead and gone. Don’t throw away your life on a corpse.”

“No, Mance, I won’t let you—”

He shoved her roughly and turned to the soldier on his left. “Let’s go. Andale!”

Lara looked shocked, her eyes wide, her mouth open in protest.

“Andale!” he repeated to the soldiers, louder, and started walking toward the gate. They rushed to catch up with him. He did not dare look back at Lara as the soldiers marched him into the access tunnel that led to the Clippership’s hatch. His last sight of her was the stunned look on her face. He didn’t want to see the tears filling her eyes, the hopelessness. He felt wretched enough for both of them.

The access tunnel was smooth windowless plastic. A birth canal, Bracknell thought. I’m being born into another life. Everything I had, everything and everyone I knew, is behind me now. I’m leaving my life behind me and entering hell.

And then he saw the bulky form of Rev. Danvers standing at the end of the tunnel, blocking the Clippership hatch. The minister was also in black, he looked downcast, sorrowful, almost guilty.

Bracknell felt a wave of fury burn through his guts. Damned ignorant viper. Frightened of anything new, anything different. He’s happy that the tower failed, but he’s trying to put on a sympathetic face.

Bracknell walked right up to Danvers. “Don’t tell me you’re going out to the Belt with me.”

Danver’s face reddened. “No, I hadn’t intended to. But if you feel the need for spiritual consolation, perhaps I—”

With a bitter laugh, Bracknell said, “Don’t worry, I was only joking.”

“I can contact the New Morality office at Ceres on your behalf,” Danvers suggested.

Bracknell wanted to spit out, “Go to hell,” but he bit his lip and said nothing.

“You’ll need spiritual comfort out there,” Danvers said, his voice low, almost trembling. “You don’t have to be alone in your time of tribulation.”

“Is that what you came here to tell me? That I can have some pious psalm singer drone in my ear? Some consolation!”

“No,” Danvers said, his heavy head sinking slightly. “I came to … to tell you how sorry I am that things have worked out the way they have.”

“Sure you are.”

“I am. Truly I am. When I reported to my superiors about your using nanotechnology, I was merely doing my duty. I had no personal animosity toward you. Quite the opposite.”

Despite his anger Bracknell could see the distress in Danvers’s flushed face. Some of the fury leached out of him.

“I had no idea it would lead to this,” Danvers was going on, almost blubbering. “You must believe me, I never wanted to cause harm to you or anyone else.”

“Of course not,” Bracknell said tightly.

“I was merely doing my duty.”

“Sure.”

One of the soldiers prodded Bracknell’s back.

“I’ve got to get aboard,” he said to Danvers.

“I’ll pray for you.”

“Yeah. Do that.”

They left Danvers at the hatch and entered the Clippership. Its circular passenger compartment was empty: twenty rows of seats arranged two by two with an aisle down the middle. Instead of flight attendants, two marshals with stun wands strapped to their hips were standing just inside the hatch.

“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.

IN TRANSIT

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.

CERES

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.

Just as the pitch of the chatter behind started to rise to the level of impatience, a huge mountain of a shaggy, red-haired man strode out onto the stage. Bracknell expected to see the stage’s floorboards sag under his weight, even in the lunar-level gravity.

“My name’s George Ambrose,” he said, in a surprisingly sweet tenor voice. “For some obscure reason folks ’round here call me Big George.”

A few wary laughs from the convicts.

“For my sins I’ve been elected chief administrator of this habitat. It’s like bein’ the mayor or the governor. Top dog. Which means everybody drops their fookin’ problems in my lap.”

Like the guards, George Ambrose wore coral-red coveralls, although his looked old and more than slightly faded. His brick-red hair was a wild thatch that merged with an equally thick beard.

Pointing at his audience, Ambrose continued, “You blokes’ve been sent here because you were found guilty of crimes. Each of you has been sentenced to a certain length of what they call penal servitude. That means you work for peanuts or less. Okay. I don’t like havin’ my home serve as a penal colony, but the powers-that-be back Earthside don’t know what else to do with you. They sure don’t want you anywhere near them!”

No one laughed.

“Okay. Here’s the way we work it here in the Belt. We don’t give a shit about your past. What’s done is done. You’re here and you’re gonna work for the length of your sentence. Some of you got life, so you’re gonna stay here in the Belt. The rest of you, if you work hard and keep your arses clean, you’ll be able to go home with a clear file once you’ve served your time. You can’t get rejuvenation treatments while you’re serving time, of course, but we can rejuve you soon’s your time’s been served, if you can afford it. Fair enough?”

Bracknell heard muttering behind him. Then someone called out, “Do we get any choice in the jobs we get?”

Ambrose’s shaggy brows rose slightly. “Some. We’ve got miners and other employers all across the Belt reviewin’ your files. Some of ’em will make requests for you. If you get more’n one request you can take your choice. Only one, then you’re stuck with it.”

A deep, heavy voice asked, “Suppose I don’t get any?”

“Then I’ll have to deal with you,” Ambrose replied. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty of work to be done out here. You won’t sit around doin’ nothing.”

I’m here for life, Bracknell said to himself. I’ll have to make a life for myself out here in the Belt. Maybe it’s a good thing that I won’t be allowed any rejuvenation treatments. I’ll just get old and die out here.

JOB OFFER

The rest of the day, the convicts were led through medical exams and psychological interviews, then shown to the quarters they would live in until assigned to a job. Bracknell noted that each of the prisoners obeyed the guards’ instructions without objection. This is all new to them, and they don’t know what to make of it, he thought. There’s no sense making trouble and there’s no place for them to run to. We’re millions of klicks from Earth now; tens of millions of kilometers.

They were served a decent meal in a cafeteria that had been cleared of all its regular customers. No mixing with the local population, Bracknell realized. Not yet, at least.

At the end of the long, strangely tense day, the guards led them down a long corridor faced with blank doors and assigned them to their sleeping quarters, two to a compartment. Bracknell was paired with a frail-looking older man, white haired and with skin that looked like creased and crumpled parchment.

The door closed behind them. He heard the lock click. Surveying the compartment, Bracknell saw a pair of bunks, a built-in desk and bureau, a folding door that opened onto the lavatory.

“Not bad,” said his companion. He went to the lower bunk and sat on it possessively. “Kinda plush, after that bucket we rode here in.”

Bracknell nodded tightly. “I’ll take the upper bunk.”

“Good. I got a fear of heights.” The older man got up and went to the bureau. Opening the top drawer he exclaimed, “Look! They even got jammies for us!”

Trying to place the man’s accent, Bracknell asked, “You’re British?”

Frowning, the man replied, “Boston Irish. My name’s Fennelly.”

Bracknell extended his hand. “I’m—”

“I know who you are. You’re the screamer.”

Feeling embarrassed, Bracknell admitted, “I have nightmares.”

“I’m a pretty heavy sleeper. Maybe that’s why they put us in together.”

“Maybe,” Bracknell said.

“You’re the guy from the skytower, ain’tcha.”

“That’s right.”

“They arrested me for lewd and lascivious behavior,” said Fennelly, with an exaggerated wink. “I’m gay.”

“Homosexual?”

“That’s right, kiddo. Watch your ass!” And Fennelly cackled as he walked to the lavatory, nearly stumbling in the light gravity.

In the top bunk with the lights out and the faintly glowing ceiling a bare meter above his head, Bracknell suddenly realized the ludicrousness of it all. Fennelly’s down there wondering if I’m going to keep him up all night with my nightmares and I’m up here worried that he might try to make a pass at me. It was almost laughable.

If he did dream, Bracknell remembered nothing of it in the morning. They were awakened by a synthesized voice calling through the intercom, “Breakfast in thirty minutes in the cafeteria. Directions are posted on the display screens in the corridor.”

The scrambled eggs were mediocre, but better than the fare they had gotten on the Alhambra. After breakfast the same quartet of guards took the convicts, one by one, to job interviews. Bracknell watched them leave the cafeteria until he was the only person left sitting at the long tables.

No one wants to take me on, he thought. I’m a pariah. Sitting alone with nothing to do, his mind drifted back to the skytower and its collapse, and the mockery of a trial that had condemned him to a life of exile. And Victor’s betrayal. It was Victor’s testimony that convicted me, he thought. Then he told himself, No, you were judged and sentenced before the first minute of the trial. But Victor did betray you, insisted a voice in his mind. He sat there and lied. Deliberately.

Why? Why? He was my friend. Why did he turn on me?

And Danvers. He reported to his New Morality superiors that we were using nanotechnology. In league with the devil, as far as he’s concerned. Did the New Morality have something to do with the tower’s collapse? Did they sabotage the skytower? No, they couldn’t have. They wouldn’t have. But somebody did. Suddenly Bracknell was convinced of it. Somebody deliberately sabotaged the tower! It couldn’t have collapsed by itself. The construction was sound. Somebody sabotaged it.

One of the guards reappeared at the cafeteria’s double doors and crooked a finger at him. Bracknell got to his feet and followed the guard down another corridor—or maybe it was merely an extension of the passageway he’d gone through earlier. It was impossible to get a feeling for the size or scope of this habitat from the inside, and he and his fellow convicts had not been allowed an outside view.

There were other people moving along this corridor, men in shirts and trousers, women wearing skirted dresses or blouses and slacks. He saw only a few in coveralls. They all looked as if they had someplace to go, some task to accomplish. That’s what I must have looked like, back before the accident, Bracknell thought. Back when I had a life.

But it wasn’t an accident, whispered a voice in his head. It wasn’t your fault. The tower was deliberately destroyed.

He saw names on the doors lining both sides of the corridors. Some of the doors were open, revealing offices or conference rooms. This is where they run this habitat, he realized. Why is this guard bringing me here?

They stopped at a door marked chief administrator. The guard opened it without knocking. Inside was a sizable office: several desks with young men and women busily whispering into lip mikes. Their display screens showed charts and graphs in vivid colors. They glanced up at him and the guard, then quickly returned their attention to their work.

Gesturing for him to follow, the guard led Bracknell past their desks and to an inner door. No name on it. Again the guard opened it without knocking. It was obviously an anteroom. A matronly looking woman with short-cropped silver hair sat at the only desk, holding a conversation in low tones with another woman’s image in her display screen. Beyond her desk was still another door, also unmarked.

She looked up and, without missing a beat of her conversation, touched a button on her phone console. The inner door popped open a few centimeters. The guard shooed Bracknell to it.

Pushing the door all the way open, Bracknell saw George Ambrose sitting behind a desk that looked too small for his bulk, like a man sitting at a child’s play desk. He was speaking to his desktop screen.

“Come on in and sit down,” Ambrose said. “Be with you in a sec.” Turning his gaze to his desktop screen he said, “Save file. Clear screen.”

The display went dark as Bracknell took the contoured chair in front of the desk. It gave slightly under his weight. Ambrose swiveled his high-backed chair to face Bracknell squarely.

“I’ve got a message for you,” Ambrose said.

“From Lara?”

Shaking his shaggy head, Ambrose said, “Convicts aren’t allowed messages from Earthside, normally. But this one is from some New Morality bloke, the Reverend Elliott Danvers.”

“Oh.” The surge of hope that Bracknell felt faded away.

“D’you want to see it in privacy?”

“No, it doesn’t matter.”

Pointing to the wall on Bracknell’s right, Ambrose said, “Okay, then, here it is.”

Danvers’ slightly bloated, slightly flushed face appeared on the wall screen. Bracknell felt his innards tighten.

“Mance—if you don’t mind me calling you by your first name—I hope this message finds you well and healthy after your long journey to Ceres. I know this is a time of turmoil and anguish for you, but I want you to realize that you are not alone, not forgotten. In your hour of need, you may call on me. Whenever you feel the need of council, or prayer, or even just the need to hear a familiar voice, call me. The New Morality will pay the charges. Call me whenever you wish.”

Danvers’s image disappeared, replaced by the cross-and-scroll logo of the New Morality.

Bracknell stared at the screen for a few heartbeats, then turned back to Ambrose. “That’s the entire message?”

Nodding, “Looks it. I di’n’t open it till you got here.”

Bracknell said nothing.

“D’you want to send an answer? It’ll take about an hour to reach Earth.”

“No. No answer.”

“You sure?”

“That man’s testimony helped convict me.”

Ambrose shook his red-maned head. “Way it looks to me, you were convicted before the trial even started. They needed a scapegoat. Can’t have four million deaths and chalk it up as an act of god.”

Bracknell stared at the man. It was difficult to tell the color of his eyes beneath those bushy red brows.

“Well, anyway,” Ambrose said more cheerfully, “I got a job offer for you.”

“A job offer?”

“Only one. You’re not a really popular fella, y’know.”

“That means I’ll have to take the job whether I want to or not.”

“ ’Fraid so.”

Taking in a breath, Bracknell asked, “What is it?”

“Skipper of the ship you came in on. Says he needs a new third mate.”

Blinking with surprise, Bracknell said, “I don’t know much about spacecraft.”

“You’ll learn on the job. It’s a good offer, a lot better than spendin’ half your life in a suit runnin’ nanobugs on some chunk o’ rock.”

“The captain of the Alhambra asked for me? Me, specifically?”

“That he did.”

“Why on Earth would he do that?” Bracknell wondered.

“You’re not on Earth, mate. Take the job and be glad of it. You got no choice.”

THE BELT

At first Bracknell half-thought, half-feared, that he’d been brought to the Alhambra to become a husband for the captain’s daughter. His first day aboard the ship disabused him of that notion.

Bracknell was taken from the habitat by one of the coral-uniformed guards to an airlock, where he retraced his steps of a few days earlier and returned to the Alhambra. The captain was standing at the other end of the connector tunnel with his hands clasped behind his back, waiting for him with a sour expression on his lean, pallid face.

“I’m taking you on against my better judgment,” said the captain as he walked with Bracknell toward the ship’s bridge. Bracknell saw that he gripped a stun wand in his right hand. “Only the fact that my third man jumped his contract and took off for Earthside has made me desperate enough to do this.”

Bracknell began, “I appreciate—”

“You will address me as Sir or Captain,” the captain interrupted. “The computers do most of the brainwork aboard ship, but you will still have to learn astrogation, logistics, communications, propulsion, and life support. If you goof off or prove too stupid to master these subjects I’ll sell you off to the first work gang on the first rock we rendezvous with. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly clear,” said Bracknell. Then, seeing the captain’s eyes flare, he hastily added, “Sir.”

Captain Farad stopped at a door in the corridor. “This is your quarters. You will maintain it in shipshape condition at all times. You’ll find clothing in there. It should fit you; if it doesn’t, alter it. I’ll expect you on the bridge, ready to begin your duties, in half an hour.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bracknell.

Alhambra departed Ceres that day, heading deeper into the Belt to begin picking up metals and minerals from mining crews at various asteroids. For the next several weeks Bracknell studied the computer’s files on all he was supposed to learn, and took regular stints of duty on the bridge, always under the sternly watchful eyes of Captain Farad. He saw nothing of the captain’s daughter.

He spent virtually all of his spare time learning about the ship and its systems. Like most deep-space vessels, Alhambra consisted of two modules balanced on either side of a five-kilometer-long buckyball tether, rotating to produce an artificial gravity inside them. One module held the crew’s quarters and the cargo hold that was often used to hold convicts outward bound to the Belt. The other module contained supplies and what had once been a smelter facility. The smelter had become useless since the introduction of nanomachines to reduce asteroids to purified metals and minerals.

The captain assigned Bracknell to the communications console at first. It was highly automated; all Bracknell had to do was watch the screens and make certain that there was always a steaming mug of coffee in the receptacle built into the left arm of the captain’s command chair.

Through the round ports set into the bridge’s bulkhead Bracknell could see outside: nothing but dark emptiness out there. The deeply tinted quartz windows cut out all but the brightest stars. There were plenty of them to see, but somehow they seemed to accentuate the cold darkness out there rather than alleviate it. No Moon in that empty sky. No warmth or comfort. For days on end he didn’t even see an asteroid, despite being in the thick of the so-called Belt.

Bracknell didn’t see the captain’s daughter either until the day one of the crew’s family got injured.

He was gazing morosely through the port at the endless emptiness out there when an alarm started hooting, startling him like a sudden electric shock.

“What’s going on there, Number Three?” the captain growled.

Bracknell saw that one of the keys on his console was blinking red. He leaned a thumb on it and his center screen showed two women kneeling beside the unconscious body of what appeared to be a teenaged boy. His face was covered with blood.

“We’ve had an accident!” one of the women was shouting, looking up into the camera set far above her. “Emergency! We need help down here!”

“What the hell’s going on over there?” the captain growled. Pointing at Bracknell, he commanded, “Get into a suit and go across to them.”

“Me?” he piped.

“No, Jesus Christ and the twelve apostles. You, dammit! Get moving! Take a medical kit and a VR rig. Addie will handle whatever medical aid the kid needs.”

That was how Bracknell learned the name of the captain’s daughter: Addie.

He jumped from his comm console chair and loped to the main airlock. It took several minutes for him to wriggle into one of the nanofabric spacesuits stored in the lockers there, and minutes more for him to locate the medical kit and virtual reality rig stored nearby. Through the ship’s intercom the captain swore and yelled at him every microsecond of the time.

“The kid could bleed to death by the time you get your dumb ass there!”

It was scary riding the trolley along the five-kilometer-long tether that connected the ship’s two rotating units. The trolley was nothing more than a platform with a minuscule electric motor propelling it. With nothing protecting him except the flimsy nanofiber suit, Bracknell felt like a turkey wrapped in a plastic bag inside a microwave oven. He knew that high-energy radiation was sleeting down on him from the pale, distant Sun and the still-more-distant stars. He hoped that the suit’s radiation protection was as good as its manufacturer claimed.

At last he reached the smelter unit and clambered through its airlock hatch. He felt much safer inside.

Despite its being unused for several years, the smelter bay was still gritty and smeared with dark swaths of sooty dust. As Bracknell pulled down the hood of his monomolecular-thin suit, a heavy, pungent odor filled his nostrils. The boy was semiconscious by the time Bracknell reached him. The two women were still kneeling by him. They had cleaned most of the blood from his face.

Clamping the VR rig around his head so that its camera was positioned just above his eyes, Bracknell asked, “What happened?”

One of the women pointed to the catwalk that circled high above the smelting ovens. “He fell.”

“How in the world could he fall from up there?”

The woman snapped, “He’s a teenaged boy. He was playing a game with his brother.”

“Thank the Lord we’re running at one-sixth g,” said the other woman.

Then Bracknell heard the captain’s daughter’s voice in his earplug. “The bleeding seems stopped. We must test to see if he has a concussion.”

For the better part of an hour Bracknell followed Addie’s instructions. The boy had a concussion, all right, and a bad laceration on his scalp. Probably not a fractured skull, but they would X-ray him once they had him safely in the infirmary. No other bones seemed to be broken, although his right knee was badly swollen.

At Addie’s direction he sprayed a bandage over the laceration and inflated a temporary splint onto the leg. With the women’s help he got the still-groggy kid into a nanosuit. All three of them carried him to the airlock and strapped him onto the trolley.

Clinging to the trolley by a handhold, Bracknell again rode the length of the ship’s connecting tether, surrounded by swarms of stars that gazed unblinkingly down at him. And invisible radiation that could kill him in an instant if his suit’s protection failed. He tried not to think about that. He gazed at the stars and wished he could appreciate their beauty. One of them was Earth, he knew, but he couldn’t tell which one it was.

Addie and the captain were waiting for him at the airlock on the other end of the tether. Together they carried the boy to the infirmary that had once been Bracknell’s isolation cell and left him in Addie’s care.

“What’s a teenaged boy doing aboard the ship, captain?” Bracknell asked as he peeled himself out of the nanosuit, back at the airlock.

“My number one sails with his family. They make their quarters in the old smelter. Cheaper for him than paying rent at Ceres, and his wife’s aboard to keep him company.”

A cozy arrangement, Bracknell thought. But boys can get themselves into trouble. I’ll bet they don’t sail with us on the next trip from Ceres.

“Your shift on the bridge is just about finished,” the captain said gruffly, as they headed back toward the bridge. “You might as well go back to your quarters. I can get along on the bridge without you.”

It wasn’t until he was back in his quarters, after a quick stop at the galley for some hot soup, that Bracknell realized his duty shift still had more than two hours to run.

Was the captain being kind to me? he wondered.

PURGATORY

His life had no purpose, Bracknell realized. He breathed, he ate, he slept, he worked on the bridge of Alhambra under the baleful scrutiny of Captain Farad. But why? What was the point of it? He lived for no reason, no goal, drifting through the cold dark emptiness of the Belt, sailing from one nameless chunk of rock to another, meaninglessly. He was like an automaton, working his brain-numbingly dull tasks as if under remote control while his mind churned the same agonizing visions over and over again: the tower, the collapse, the crushed and bleeding bodies.

Sometimes he thought of Lara and wondered what she was doing. Then he would tell himself that he wanted her to forget him, to build a new life for herself. One of the terms of his exile was that neither Lara nor anyone else he’d known on Earth would be told where he was. He was cut off from all communication with his former friends and associates; he was totally banished. For all those who once knew him on Earth, Mance Bracknell was dead and gone forever.

Except for Rev. Danvers. He got a message through to me; maybe he’ll accept a message from me. Bracknell tried to put that out of his mind. What good would it do to talk to the minister? Besides, Danvers had helped to convict him. Maybe his call was in response to a guilty conscience, Bracknell thought. Damn the man! Better to be totally cut off than to have this slim hope of some communication, some link with his old life. Danvers was torturing him, holding out that meaningless thread of hope.

Now and then, between duty shifts and always with the captain’s permission, Bracknell would pull on one of the nanofabric spacesuits and go outside the ship. Hanging at the end of a tether he would gaze out at the stars, an infinite universe of stars and worlds beyond counting. It made him feel small, insignificant, a meaningless mote in the vast spinning galaxy. He learned to find the blue dot that was Earth. It made him feel worse than ever. It reminded him of how alone he was, how far from warmth and love and hope. In time, he stopped his outside excursions. He feared that one day he would open his suit and let the universe end his existence.

The only glimmer of sunshine in his new life was the captain’s daughter, Addie. Although Alhambra was a sizable ship, most of its volume was taken up by cargo holds and the smelting facility where the first mate’s family lived. The crew numbered only twelve, at most, and often Farad sailed without a full complement of crew. The habitation module was small, almost intimate. Bracknell knew there were liaisons between crew members; he himself had been propositioned more than once, by men as well as women. He had always refused. None of them tempted him at all. He saw relationships form among crew members, both hetero and homosexual. He saw them break apart, too, sometimes in bitterness and sorrow, more than once in violence that the captain had to suppress with force.

Once in a while he bumped into Addie, quite literally, as they squeezed past one another in the ship’s narrow passageways or happened to be in the galley at the same time. She always had a bright smile for him on her dark, almond-eyed face. Her figure was enticingly full and supple. Yet he never spoke more than a few words of polite conversation to her, never let himself react to the urgings of his glands.

One day, as he left the bridge after another tediously boring stint of duty, Bracknell ducked into the galley for a cup of coffee. Addie was sitting at the little square table, sipping from a steaming mug.

“How’s the coffee today?” Bracknell asked.

“It’s tea.”

“Oh.” He picked out a mug and poured from the ceramic urn, then pulled a chair out and sat next to her. Addie’s eyes flicked to the open hatch and for an instant Bracknell thought she was going to jump to her feet and flee.

Instead, she seemed to relax, at least a little.

“Life on this ship isn’t terribly exciting, is it?” he said.

“No, I suppose it isn’t.”

For long moments neither one of them knew what to say. At last Bracknell asked, “Your name—Addle. Is it short for Adelaide?”

She broke into an amused smile. “No, certainly not. My full name is Aditi.”

“Aditi?”

“It is a Hindu name. It means ‘free and unbounded.’ It is the name of the mother of the gods.”

Hindu, Bracknell thought. Of course. The captain told me she’s from India. That explains the lilt in her accent.

“Free and unbounded,” he echoed. “Kind of ironic, here on this nutshell of a ship.”

“Yes,” she agreed forlornly. Then she brightened. “But my father is making arrangements for me to marry. He has amassed a large dowry for me. In another few years I will be wed to a wealthy man and live in comfort back on Earth.”

“You’re engaged?”

“Oh, no, not yet. My father hasn’t found the proper man for me. But he is seeking one out.”

“And you’ll marry whoever he picks?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Don’t you want to pick your husband for yourself?”

Her smile turned slightly remorseful. “What chance do I have for that, aboard this ship?”

Bracknell had to admit she was right.

He went back to his quarters, but before he could close the door, the captain pushed against it, glowering at him.

“I told you to keep away from my daughter.”

“She was in the galley,” Bracknell explained. “We spoke a few words together.”

“About marriage.”

“Yes.” Bracknell felt his temper rising. “She’s waiting for you to find her a husband.”

“She’ll have to wait a few more years. Fifteen’s too young for marriage. Maybe it’s old enough in India, but where I come from—”

“Fifteen? She’s only fifteen?”

“That’s right.”

“How can she be a doctor…?”

The captain’s twisted lip sneered at him. “She’s smart enough to run the computer’s medical diagnostics. Like most doctors, she lets the computer program make the decisions.”

“But—”

“You keep your distance from her.”

“Yes, sir,” Bracknell said fervently. Fifteen, he was thinking. That voluptuous body is only fifteen years old.

“Remember, I watch everything you do,” the captain said. “Stay away from her.”

He left Bracknell’s quarters as abruptly as he’d entered. Bracknell stood there alone, shaking inside at the thought that a fifteen-year-old could look so alluring.

YAMAGATA ESTATE

He was the family’s oldest retainer, a wizened, wrinkled man with a flowing white mane that swept past the shoulders of his modest sky-blue kimono. Nobuhiko remembered riding on those shoulders when he’d been a tot. The man had never accepted rejuvenation treatments, but his shoulders were still broad and only slightly sagging.

They walked together along the gravel path that wound through the carefully tended rock garden just inside the high wall that sheltered the Yamagata estate in the hills above New Kyoto. A cutting, clammy wind was blowing low gray clouds across the sky; Nobuhiko suppressed the urge to shiver beneath his light gray business suit. He had never shown such a weakness before his servant and he never willingly would.

Never show a weakness to anyone, he reminded himself. Not even yourself. He had been shocked when he learned that four million had been killed by the skytower’s collapse. Four million! Nobu had known there would be deaths, that was unavoidable. It was what the military called “collateral damage.” But four million! It had taken years to overcome the sense of guilt that had risen inside him like a tidal wave, threatening to engulf him. What difference does it make? he argued against his own conscience. Four hundred or four thousand or four million? They would have died anyway, sooner or later. The world goes on. I did what I had to do. For the good of the family, for the good of the corporation. For the good of Japan, even. What’s done is done. It hadn’t been finished easily, he knew. There were still more lives that had to be snuffed out, loyal men and women whose only offense had been to carry out Nobuhiko’s wishes. They were repaid with death, the ultimate silencer. But now it’s done, Nobuhiko thought. It’s finished at last. That’s what this old man has come to tell me.

Once they were too far from the house to be overheard, Nobu said politely, “The years have been very kind to you.”

The old man dipped his chin slightly. “You are very gracious, sir.”

With a wry grin, Nobu patted his belly. “I wish I could be as fit as you are.”

The man said nothing. They both knew that Yamagata’s tastes in food and wine, and his distaste for exercise, caused the difference between their figures.

Delicately changing the subject, the old man asked, “May I inquire as to your father’s well-being?”

Nobu looked up at the sky. This man had served his father since he’d been a teenager. He still regards Saito as the head of the family, Nobu thought, no matter that Father has been retired in that lamasery for so many years.

“My father is well,” he said at last. It was not a lie, although Nobu had not heard from his father for many months.

“I am pleased to hear it. He has great strength of character to abandon this world and take the hard path toward enlightenment.”

And I do not have strength of character? Nobu snarled inwardly. Is this old assassin throwing an insult into my teeth?

Aloud, however, he said merely, “Yet some of us must remain in this world and carry its burdens.”

“Most true, sir.”

“How many years has it been since the skytower fell?” Nobuhiko asked.

“Not enough for anyone to dare suggest building another.”

“So. That is good.”

The old man dipped his chin again in acknowledgement.

“Have all the people who participated in the event been properly disposed of?”

“They have been tracked down and accounted for.” Both men knew what that meant.

“All of them?”

The old man hesitated only a fraction of a second. “All but one.”

“One?” Nobu snapped, suddenly angry. “After all this time, one of them still lives?”

“He is either very clever or very lucky.”

“Who is he? Where is he?”

“He is the nanotechnology expert that we recruited from Selene.”

Nobu could feel his pulse thundering in his ears. Before he could respond to his servant’s words the old man added:

“He has changed his identity and his appearance several times. Even his retinal patterns have been altered, my agents report. The man is something of a genius.”

“He must be found,” Nobu said firmly. “And dealt with.”

“He will be, I assure you.”

“I don’t want assurances. I want results!”

“Sir, please do not alarm yourself. The man is neutralized. He cannot tell anyone of his part in the skytower project without revealing his true identity. If he should dare to do that, we would locate him and deal with him. He is intelligent enough to understand that, so he maintains his silence.”

“Not good enough,” said Nobu. “I will not be held dependent on this fugitive’s decisions.”

“So I understand, sir. We are tracking him down.”

“No one must know why are tracking him!”

“No one does, sir, except you and me.”

Nobuhiko took a deep breath, trying to calm himself.

The old man added, “And once he is found and disposed of, I too will leave this world. Then only you will have the knowledge of the skytower program.”

“You?”

“I have lived long enough. Once this obligation to you is filled, my master, I will join my honorable ancestors.”

Nobu stood on the gravel path and stared at this relic from the ancient past. The chill wind blew the man’s long white hair across his face, hiding his expression from Nobu. Still, Yamagata could see the implacable determination in those unblinking eyes.

BETRAYAL

Months slipped into years. Alhambra plied its slow, silent way through the Belt and then back toward Earth at least once a year. Bracknell saw the blue and white splendor of his home world, close enough almost to touch, bright clouds and sparkling seas and land covered with green. All his life was there, all his hopes and love and dreams. But he never reached it. The captain and other crew members shuttled down to the surface for a few days each time they visited Earth, but Bracknell stayed aboard the ship, knowing that no port of entry would accept an exile, not even for a day or two of ship’s liberty. Nor would Selene or any of the other lunar settlements.

Each time, once Alhambra’s crew unloaded the refined metals it had carried in its hold and taken a few days’ liberty, Captain Farad headed back to the dark silence of the Belt once more.

Like a vision of heaven, Bracknell said to himself as the glowing blue and white sphere dwindled in the distance. It grew blurry as his eyes teared.

He grew a beard, then shaved it off. He had a brief affair with a woman who signed aboard as a crew member to pay for her passage on a one-way trip from Earth to Ceres, feeling almost ashamed of himself whenever he saw Addie. By the time his erstwhile lover left the ship he was glad to be rid of her.

The captain never relaxed his vigilance over his daughter, although he seemed to grow more tolerant of Bracknell holding casual conversations with her. He even invited Bracknell to have dinner with himself and his daughter, at rare intervals. The captain was sensitive enough never to talk about Earth nor to ask Bracknell about his former life.

Addie began to explain Buddhism to him, trying to help him accept the life that had been forced upon him.

“It is only temporary,” she would tell him. “This life will wither away and a new life will begin. The great wheel turns slowly, but it does turn. You must be patient.”

Bracknell listened and watched her animated face as she earnestly explained the path toward enlightenment. He never believed a word of it, but it helped to pass the time.

On some visits to Earth, Alhambra picked up other groups of convicts exiled to the Belt. The captain forbade Bracknell and the other crew members to have anything to do with them beyond what was absolutely necessary.

When fights broke out among the prisoners in the hold, the captain lowered their air pressure until everyone passed out. Then Bracknell and other crew members crammed the troublemakers into old-fashioned hard-shell spacesuits and tethered them outside the ship until they learned their lesson. It had happened many times, but Bracknell never became inured to it. Always he thought, There but for the grace of god go I.

Then he would ask himself, God? If there is a god he must be as callous and capricious as the most sadistic tyrant in history. At least the Buddha that Addie tells me about doesn’t pretend to control the world; he just sought a way to get out of it.

There is a way, Bracknell would remind himself late at night as he lay in his bunk, afraid to close his eyes and see again in his nightmares the skytower toppling, crushing the life out of so many millions, crushing the life he had once known. I can get out of this, he thought. Slice my wrists, swallow a bottle of pills from Addie’s infirmary, seal myself in an airlock and pop the outer hatch. There are lots of ways to end this existence.

Yet he kept on living. Like a man on an endless treadmill he kept going through the paces of a pointless life, condemning himself for a coward because he lacked the guts to get off the wheel of life and find oblivion.

Except for Addie he had no friends, no companions. The captain tolerated him, even socialized with him now and then, but always kept a clear line of separation between them. The women that occasionally joined the crew hardly appealed to him, except when his needs overcame his reluctance. And even in the throes of sexual passion he thought of Lara.

If I could only see her, he thought. Talk to her. Even if it’s only a few words.

In the midst of his tortured fantasies he remembered the old message from Rev. Danvers, back when he’d just started this miserable banishment. Call me, the minister had said. Despite the fact that he was supposed to be held incommunicado with everyone back on Earth, Danvers had held out that slim hope.

Bracknell was wise enough in the ways of his captain to ask Farad’s permission before attempting to contact Danvers.

The captain snorted disdainfully. “Call somebody Earthside? Won’t do you any good, they won’t put the call through.”

Desperate enough to overcome his fears, Bracknell replied, “You could put the call through for me, sir.”

The captain scowled at him and said nothing. Bracknell returned to his duties, defeated.

Yet the next day, as Bracknell took up his station on the bridge, the captain said, “Take the comm console, Mr. Bracknell.”

Feeling more curiosity than hope, Bracknell relieved the communications officer. The captain told him to put through a call for him to the Reverend Danvers, routing it through New Morality headquarters in Atlanta. His fingers trembling, Bracknell wormed the speaker plug into his ear and got to work.

With more than an hour’s transit time for messages, there was no hope of a normal conversation. It took half his duty shift for Bracknell to get through to the communications program at Atlanta and learn that Danvers was now a bishop serving in Gabon, on Africa’s west coast.

When Danvers’s ruddy face finally came up on Bracknell’s screen, the captain called from his command chair, “Go ahead and see if he’ll talk to you.”

Danvers was sitting at a polished ebony desk, wearing an open-necked black shirt with some sort of insignia pinned to the points of his collar. Behind him a window looked down on the busy streets and buildings of Libreville and, beyond, the blue Atlantic’s white-frothed combers rolling up on a beach. A dark cylindrical form snaked through the greenery beyond the city and disappeared in the frothing surf. Bracknell’s heart clutched inside him: it was the remains of the fallen skytower, still lying there after all these years.

It took more hours of one-way messages and long waits between them before Danvers realized who was calling him.

“Mance!” Surprise opened his eyes wide. “After so many years! I’m delighted to hear from you.” The bishop turned slightly in his high-backed chair. “You can probably see the remains of the skytower. It’s a tourist attraction here. People come from all over Africa to see it.”

Bracknell’s insides smoldered. A tourist attraction.

“The locals have stripped a lot from it. Filthy scavengers. We’ve had to post guards to protect the ruins, but still they sneak in and rip off parts.”

Bracknell closed his eyes, trying to keep his temper under control. No sense getting angry with Danvers; he can’t help the situation. Get to the point, tell him why you’ve contacted him.

He took a breath, then plunged in. “I was wondering, hoping, that you might get a message to Lara Tierney for me,” he said, embarrassed at how much it sounded like begging. “I don’t know where she is now, but I thought perhaps you could find her and give her a message for me.”

Then he waited. His shift on the bridge ended and his replacement arrived at the comm console but the captain silently waved the woman away. Bracknell sat there attending to the ship’s normal communications while his eyes constantly flicked back to the screen where Bishop Danvers’s image sat frozen.

At last the attention light beneath that screen went from orange to green. The bishop’s image shimmered slightly and became animated. But his expression looked doubtful, uncertain.

“Mance, she’s Lara Molina now. She and Victor married more than eighteen months ago. I performed the ceremony.”

Bracknell felt his face redden with sudden anger.

“Under the circumstances,” Bishop Danvers continued, “I don’t think it would be wise for you to contact her. After all, it would be illegal, wouldn’t it? And there’s no sense bringing up old heartaches, opening old wounds. After all, it’s taken her all this time to get you out of her mind and begin her life again. Don’t you agree that it would be better if you—”

Bracknell cut the connection with a vicious stab of his thumb on the keyboard.

Married, his mind echoed. She married Victor. The man who betrayed me. And that pompous idiot performed the ceremony. He betrayed me, too. They’ve all betrayed me!

REVELATION

For weeks Bracknell stormed through his duties aboard Alhambra, raging inwardly at Molina and Danvers. He wanted to be angry with Lara, too; he wanted to be furious with her. Yet he found he couldn’t be. He couldn’t expect her to live out the rest of her life alone. But with Victor? She married that lying, back-stabbing son of a bitch? She doesn’t realize that Victor betrayed me, Bracknell told himself; Lara doesn’t know that Victor lied in his testimony at the trial. But Victor knew, and so did Danvers. Of that Bracknell was certain. They had combined to put him out of the way so that Victor could have Lara for himself.

Bracknell understood it all now. Victor betrayed him because he wanted Lara for himself. Once the skytower collapsed, Victor had the perfect opportunity to get me out of his way forever. And Danvers helped him, of that Bracknell was certain.

Once the skytower collapsed, he repeated to himself. Could they have made the tower collapse? Caused it? Sabotaged it? Bracknell wrestled with that idea for weeks on end. No. How could they? Victor didn’t know enough about the tower’s construction to bring it down. He’s a biologist, not a structural engineer. It would take a team of trained saboteurs, demolition experts. It would take money and planning and a ruthless cold-bloodedness that was frighteningly beyond Victor’s capability. Or Danvers’s. He doubted that even the New Morality at its most fanatical had the viciousness to deliberately bring the tower down. Or the competence.

No, Bracknell concluded. Victor simply took advantage of his opportunity. Took advantage of me. And Danvers helped him.

Still, his rage boiled inside him, made him morose and curt with everyone around him, even Addie. The captain watched his new attitude and said nothing, except once, when Bracknell was assigned to escorting a new group of convicts into their makeshift quarters down in the hold. One of the prisoners started a scuffle with another one. Bracknell dove into them swinging his stun wand like a club and beat them both unconscious.

“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?”

THE PRISONER’S TALE

“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.

“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.”

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

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.

DEATH AND TRANSFUGURATION

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.”

“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?”

He sank back onto the pillow. “I don’t remember,” he lied.

The nurse cast him a doubtful glance. “There wasn’t any ID on you when they brought you in. What’s your name?”

Bracknell started to reply, then caught himself. “I… I don’t remember,” he said.

“You don’t remember your own name?”

Trying to look upset about it, Bracknell said, “I can’t remember anything. It’s all a blank.”

“Posttraumatic shock,” muttered the nurse. “We’ll have to run some scans on you, then, and check them against the files.”

She left Bracknell’s bedside. He raised himself up on his elbows and looked around. He was in a cubicle created by portable plastic partitions. His clothes were nowhere in sight. And he knew he had to get out of this hospital before the computer scans identified him as Mance Bracknell, the criminal who’d been sentenced to lifelong exile.

In his office in New Kyoto, Nobuhiko Yamagata watched the image of the white-haired servant as he delivered his final message. It’s finished, then, he said to himself. At last it’s finished. I can breathe freely again.

Within an hour the news came that a corporation ship named Hiryu had been destroyed in an accident that also wiped out the freighter Alhambra. No survivors were reported.

Nobu’s first instinct was to uncork a bottle of champagne, but he knew that would be incorrect. Besides, he found that he didn’t feel like celebrating. Instead, a profound sense of gloom settled upon him like a massive weight.

It’s finished, he repeated to himself. This terrible business is finished at last.