“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.”
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.”
