skytower. But Zach got over his shock when they described to him the coolest project of them all. He quickly asked for the detailed schematics of the skytower and began to study hard.
THE APPROACH
Lara and Bracknell were driving one of the project’s electric-powered minivans to the Quito airport. Bracknell planned to attend Skytower Corporation’s board meeting and the news conference at which they would make the announcement that the tower was ready for operations. Then they would stay for a weekend of interviews and publicity events and return to Quito the following Monday.
“You sure you don’t want to get married in Paris?” he asked her, grinning happily as he drove the quiet minivan down the steep, gravel-surfaced road. “We could have the ceremony at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Be kind of symbolic.”
Trucks and buses ground by in the opposite direction, raising clouds of gritty gray dust as they headed uphill toward Sky City.
Lara shook her head. “I tried to get through all the red tape on the computer link, Mance, but it’s hopeless. We’d have to stay two weeks, at least.”
“The French want our tourist dollars.”
“And they want to do their own blood tests, their own searches of our citizenship data. I think they even check Interpol for criminal records.”
“So we’ll get married when we come back,” he said easily.
“And we can invite our families and friends.”
“I’ll ask Victor if he can come back for the occasion and be my best man.”
Lara made no reply.
“Hey! Why don’t we ask Rev. Danvers to perform the ceremony?”
“At his new chapel?”
“Unless you’d rather do it in the cathedral in Quito.”
“No,” Lara said. “Let’s do it at the base of the tower. Rev. Danvers will be fine.”
He wanted to kiss her; he even considered pulling off on the shoulder of the road to do it. Instead, he drove in silence for a while, grinning happily. The road became paved as they neared Quito’s airport.
Traffic built up. Lara turned in her seat and looked out the rear window.
“It’s going to feel strange not seeing the tower in the sky,” she said.
“It’ll be there when we get back,” Bracknell said easily. “For the next few days you’ll just have to settle for the Eiffel Tower.”
“Docking confirmed,” said the Clippership’s copilot. He was wearing dark glasses, too, like the pilot. Zach thought he looked kind of like an Asian, but his accent sounded California or some other part of the States.
“Tell the tower crew they can begin unloading,” the pilot replied.
Zach knew what that meant. The Clipper was attached to the sky-tower now by a docking adaptor, a short piece of insulated tunnel that linked the tower’s airlock to the Clipper’s cargo hatch. A team of technicians from the skytower would come through the adaptor and begin unloading the Clipper’s cargo bay. Zach thought of them as chimps doing stupid monkey tasks.
Unseen by the tower personnel, a dozen men and women recruited from god knows where would exit one of the Clippership’s other airlocks, in spacesuits, of course, carrying the Clipper’s
Now twelve religious fanatics were out there playing with nanomachines that could kill them if they weren’t careful. Each of the EVA team bore a minicam attached to his or her helmet, so Zach could direct their actions from the safety of the cockpit, securely linked to the outside crew by hair-thin optical fibers that carried his radio commands with no chance that they’d be overheard by the guys in the tower.
Now comes the fun part, Zach thought as he powered up the laptop he would use for communicating with the EVA team.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was also remotely watching the unloading, still wondering why the supply contractor had gone to the expense of hiring a shiny new Clippership instead of sending up another automated freighter.
“In faith, ’twas strange,” he murmured as he stood in the control center, “ ’twas passing strange.”
“You spouting poetry again?” his assistant asked.
Emerson considered yanking the comm plug out of his ear, but knew that would be the wrong thing to do. Instead he asked, “How’s it going?”
“It’s going. Riley and his guys are pushin’ the packages through the hatch and I’m checkin’ ’em off as they come in. Nothing much to it. Just a lot of muscle work. Trained chimps could do this.”
Emerson could see the bored team on one of the working screens, gliding the weightless big crates along through the adaptor tunnel.
“Well just be careful in there,” he said. “Just because we’re in zero-g doesn’t mean those packages don’t have mass. Get caught between a crate and a wall and you’ll get your ribs caved in, just like on Earth.”
“I know that.” His assistant sounded impatient, waspish.
“Just make sure your chimpanzees know it.”
“What? No poetry for the occasion?”
Emerson immediately snapped, “A fool and his ribcage are soon parted.”
Zach was humming tunelessly to himself as he called up the schematics and matched them with the camera views from his EVA team. The connection between the geostationary platform and the tower’s main cables was the crucial point. Sever that link and some thirty-five thousand kilometers of skytower go crashing down to Earth. And the other thirty-five thou, on the other side of the platform, goes spinning off into space, carrying the platform with it.
He suppressed the urge to giggle, knowing it would annoy the sour-faced pilots sitting as immobile as statues an arm’s reach in front of him. I’m going to wipe out the biggest structure anybody’s ever built!
It’ll probably fall onto Quito, Zach reasoned. Kill a million people, maybe. Like the hammer of god slamming them flat. Like a big boot squishing bugs.
The culmination of my career, Zach thought. But nobody will know that I did it. Nobody really knows who I am. Not anybody who counts. But they will after this. I’m going to stand up and tell the world that I did this. Me. Franklin Zachariah. The terror of terrors. Dr. Destruction.
Lara was wearing open-weave huaraches instead of regular shoes, Bracknell realized as they inched along the line at the airport’s security site. He frowned as he thought that they’d probably want him to take off his boots before going through the metal detector.
Damned foolishness, he said to himself. There hasn’t been a terrorist threat at an airport in more than twenty years but they still go through this goddamned nonsense.
Sure enough, the stocky, stern-faced security guard pointed silently to Bracknell’s boots as Lara sailed unbothered through the metal detector’s arch. Grumbling, Bracknell tugged the boots off and thumped them down on the conveyor belt that ran through the X-ray machine.
He set off the metal detector’s alarm anyway and had to be searched by a pair of grim-looking guards. He had forgotten the handheld computer/phone he was carrying in his shirt pocket.
“No, no,” Zach said sharply into his laptop’s microphone. “Just open the capsule and wedge it into the cable. That’s all you have to do, the nanobugs’ll do the rest.”
The job was taking much longer than he’d expected. Fifty cables, that’s all we have to break, Zach grumbled silently, and these chimps are taking all fucking day to do it.
The underside of the geostationary platform looked like an immense spiderweb to Zach as he peered at it
