Mercury

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.