Mercury

“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.”