“It was all a hoax!” Yamagata was grinning from ear to ear. “The rocks were planted here. They actually came from Mars.”
“Molina salted the site?” Alexios asked, trying to look astonished.
“Either he or a confederate.”
“That’s … shocking.”
“Perhaps so, but it means that the blasted scientists have withdrawn their interdict on our operations.”
“So soon?”
Yamagata shrugged. “They will, in a day or so. In the meantime, I want you to come up here to
“Building powersats here, out of materials from Mercury itself.”
“Yes. Using nanomachines.”
Alexios nodded. “We’ll have to plan this very carefully.”
“I realize that,” Yamagata said, his grin fading only slightly. “That’s why I want you here first thing in the morning.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Good.” Yamagata’s image winked out.
Alexios leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. Victor’s finished, he said to himself. Now to get Danvers. And then my dear employer, Mr. Saito Yamagata, the murderer.
BOOK II
TEN YEARS EARLIER
THE SKYTOWER
Lara Tierney couldn’t catch her breath. It wasn’t merely the altitude, although at more than three thousand meters the air was almost painfully thin. What really took her breath away, though, was the sight of the tower splitting the sky as the ancient Humvee rattled and jounced along the rutted, climbing road. Mance, sitting beside her, handed her a lightweight pair of electronic binoculars.
“They’ll lock onto the tower,” he shouted over the grinding roar of the Humvee’s diesel engine. “Keep it in focus for you.”
Lara put the binoculars to her eyes and found that they really did make up for some of the bumps in the Humvee’s punishing ride. The skytower wavered briefly, then clicked into sharp focus, a thick dark column of what looked in the twin eyepieces like intertwined cables spiraling up, up, higher and higher, through the soft clouds and into the blue sky beyond, up into infinity.
“It’s like a banyan tree,” she gasped, resting the binoculars on her lap.
“What?” Mance Bracknell yelled from beside her. They were sitting together on the bench behind the driver, a short, stocky, dark-skinned mestizo who had inherited this rusting, dilapidated four-wheel-drive from his father, the senior taxi entrepreneur of the Quito airport.
Lara took several deep breaths, trying to get enough air into her lungs to raise her voice above the noise of the Humvee’s clattering diesel engine.
“It’s like a banyan tree,” she shouted back, turning toward him. “All those strands … woven together … like a … banyan.” She had to pull in more air.
“Right! That’s exactly right!” Mance yelled, his dark brown eyes gleaming excitedly. “Like a banyan tree. It’s organic! Nanotubes spun into filaments and then wrapped into coils; the coils are wound into those cables you’re looking at.”
She had never seen him so tanned, so athletically fit, so indestructibly cheerful. He looks more handsome than ever, she thought.
“Just like a banyan tree,” he repeated, straining to make himself heard. “Damned near a hundred thousand individual buckyball fibers wound into those strands. Strongest structure on the face of the Earth.”
“It’s magnificent!”
Bracknell’s smile grew wider. “We’re still almost thirty kilometers away. Wait’ll you get up close.”
Like the beanstalk of the old fairy tale, the skytower rose up into the heavens. Lara spent the jouncing, dusty ride alternately staring at it and then glancing at Mance, sitting there as happy as a little boy on Christmas morning opening his presents. He’s doing something that no one else has been able to do, she thought, and he’s succeeding. He has what he wants. And that includes me.
All during the long flight from Denver to Quito she had wondered about her impulsive promise to marry Mance Bracknell. For the past three years all she’d seen of him was his quick visits back to the States and his occasional video messages. He had gone to Ecuador, asked her to marry him, and she had agreed. She had flown to Quito once before, when Mance was just starting on the project. He was so busy, so happily buried in his work that she had quietly returned home to Colorado. He didn’t need her underfoot, and he barely raised more than a perfunctory objection when she told him she was going back home.
That was more than three years ago. I have a rival for his attentions, Lara realized. This tower he’s building. She wondered if her rival would always stand between them. But when Mance called this latest time and asked her to come to Ecuador and stay with him, she had agreed immediately even though he hadn’t mentioned a word about marriage.
Once she saw him, though, waiting for her at the airport terminal in Quito, the way his whole face lit up when he caught sight of her, the frenetic way he waved to her from the other side of the glass security partition as she went through the tiresome lines at customs, the way he smiled and took her in his arms and kissed her right there in the middle of the crowded airport terminal—she knew she loved him and she would follow him wherever he went, rival and marriage and everything else fading into trivia.
“…if it works,” he was hollering over the rumble of the truck’s groaning engine, “we’ll be able to provide electricity for the whole blinking country. Maybe for Colombia, Peru, parts of Brazil, the whole blasted northwestern bloc of South America!”
“If what works?” she asked.
“Tapping the ionosphere,” he answered. Gesturing with both hands as he spoke, he shouted, “Enormous electrical energy up there, megawatts per cubic meter. At first we were worried that the tower would be like a big lightning rod, conducting down to the ground. Zap! Melt the bedrock, maybe.”
“My god,” Lara said.
“But we insulated the outer shell so that’s not a problem.”
Before Lara could think of something to say, Mance went on, “Then I started thinking about how we might tap some of that energy and use it to power the elevators.”
“Tap the ionosphere?”
“Right. It’s replenished by the solar wind. Earth’s magnetic field traps solar protons and electrons.”
“That’s what causes the northern lights,” Lara said, straining to raise her voice above the laboring diesel’s growl.
