Mercury

“Emergency! We need help down here!”

“What the hell’s going on over there?” the captain growled. Pointing at Bracknell, he commanded, “Get into a suit and go across to them.”

“Me?” he piped.

“No, Jesus Christ and the twelve apostles. You, dammit! Get moving! Take a medical kit and a VR rig. Addie will handle whatever medical aid the kid needs.”

That was how Bracknell learned the name of the captain’s daughter: Addie.

He jumped from his comm console chair and loped to the main airlock. It took several minutes for him to wriggle into one of the nanofabric spacesuits stored in the lockers there, and minutes more for him to locate the medical kit and virtual reality rig stored nearby. Through the ship’s intercom the captain swore and yelled at him every microsecond of the time.

“The kid could bleed to death by the time you get your dumb ass there!”

It was scary riding the trolley along the five-kilometer-long tether that connected the ship’s two rotating units. The trolley was nothing more than a platform with a minuscule electric motor propelling it. With nothing protecting him except the flimsy nanofiber suit, Bracknell felt like a turkey wrapped in a plastic bag inside a microwave oven. He knew that high-energy radiation was sleeting down on him from the pale, distant Sun and the still-more-distant stars. He hoped that the suit’s radiation protection was as good as its manufacturer claimed.

At last he reached the smelter unit and clambered through its airlock hatch. He felt much safer inside.

Despite its being unused for several years, the smelter bay was still gritty and smeared with dark swaths of sooty dust. As Bracknell pulled down the hood of his monomolecular-thin suit, a heavy, pungent odor filled his nostrils. The boy was semiconscious by the time Bracknell reached him. The two women were still kneeling by him. They had cleaned most of the blood from his face.

Clamping the VR rig around his head so that its camera was positioned just above his eyes, Bracknell asked, “What happened?”

One of the women pointed to the catwalk that circled high above the smelting ovens. “He fell.”

“How in the world could he fall from up there?”

The woman snapped, “He’s a teenaged boy. He was playing a game with his brother.”

“Thank the Lord we’re running at one-sixth g,” said the other woman.

Then Bracknell heard the captain’s daughter’s voice in his earplug. “The bleeding seems stopped. We must test to see if he has a concussion.”

For the better part of an hour Bracknell followed Addie’s instructions. The boy had a concussion, all right, and a bad laceration on his scalp. Probably not a fractured skull, but they would X-ray him once they had him safely in the infirmary. No other bones seemed to be broken, although his right knee was badly swollen.

At Addie’s direction he sprayed a bandage over the laceration and inflated a temporary splint onto the leg. With the women’s help he got the still-groggy kid into a nanosuit. All three of them carried him to the airlock and strapped him onto the trolley.

Clinging to the trolley by a handhold, Bracknell again rode the length of the ship’s connecting tether, surrounded by swarms of stars that gazed unblinkingly down at him. And invisible radiation that could kill him in an instant if his suit’s protection failed. He tried not to think about that. He gazed at the stars and wished he could appreciate their beauty. One of them was Earth, he knew, but he couldn’t tell which one it was.

Addie and the captain were waiting for him at the airlock on the other end of the tether. Together they carried the boy to the infirmary that had once been Bracknell’s isolation cell and left him in Addie’s care.

“What’s a teenaged boy doing aboard the ship, captain?” Bracknell asked as he peeled himself out of the nanosuit, back at the airlock.

“My number one sails with his family. They make their quarters in the old smelter. Cheaper for him than paying rent at Ceres, and his wife’s aboard to keep him company.”

A cozy arrangement, Bracknell thought. But boys can get themselves into trouble. I’ll bet they don’t sail with us on the next trip from Ceres.

“Your shift on the bridge is just about finished,” the captain said gruffly, as they headed back toward the bridge. “You might as well go back to your quarters. I can get along on the bridge without you.”

It wasn’t until he was back in his quarters, after a quick stop at the galley for some hot soup, that Bracknell realized his duty shift still had more than two hours to run.

Was the captain being kind to me? he wondered.

PURGATORY

His life had no purpose, Bracknell realized. He breathed, he ate, he slept, he worked on the bridge of Alhambra under the baleful scrutiny of Captain Farad. But why? What was the point of it? He lived for no reason, no goal, drifting through the cold dark emptiness of the Belt, sailing from one nameless chunk of rock to another, meaninglessly. He was like an automaton, working his brain-numbingly dull tasks as if under remote control while his mind churned the same agonizing visions over and over again: the tower, the collapse, the crushed and bleeding bodies.

Sometimes he thought of Lara and wondered what she was doing. Then he would tell himself that he wanted her to forget him, to build a new life for herself. One of the terms of his exile was that neither Lara nor anyone else he’d known on Earth would be told where he was. He was cut off from all communication with his former friends and associates; he was totally banished. For all those who once knew him on Earth, Mance Bracknell was dead and gone forever.

Except for Rev. Danvers. He got a message through to me; maybe he’ll accept a message from me. Bracknell tried to put that out of his mind. What good would it do to talk to the minister? Besides, Danvers had helped to convict him. Maybe his call was in response to a guilty conscience, Bracknell thought. Damn the man! Better to be totally cut off than to have this slim hope of some communication, some link with his old life. Danvers was torturing him, holding out that meaningless thread of hope.

Now and then, between duty shifts and always with the captain’s permission, Bracknell would pull on one of the nanofabric spacesuits and go outside the ship. Hanging at the end of a tether he would gaze out at the stars, an infinite universe of stars and worlds beyond counting. It made him feel small, insignificant, a meaningless mote in the vast spinning galaxy. He learned to find the blue dot that was Earth. It made him feel worse than ever. It reminded him of how alone he was, how far from warmth and love and hope. In time, he stopped his outside excursions. He feared that one day he would open his suit and let the universe end his existence.

The only glimmer of sunshine in his new life was the captain’s daughter, Addie. Although Alhambra was a sizable ship, most of its volume was taken up by cargo holds and the smelting facility where the first mate’s family lived. The crew numbered only twelve, at most, and often Farad sailed without a full complement of crew. The habitation module was small, almost intimate. Bracknell knew there were liaisons between crew members; he himself had been propositioned more than once, by men as well as women. He had always refused. None of them tempted him at all. He saw relationships form among crew members, both hetero and homosexual. He saw them break apart, too, sometimes in bitterness and sorrow, more than once in violence that the captain had to suppress with force.

Once in a while he bumped into Addie, quite literally, as they squeezed past one another in the ship’s narrow passageways or happened to be in the galley at the same time. She always had a bright smile for him on her dark, almond-eyed face. Her figure was enticingly full and supple. Yet he never spoke more than a few words of polite conversation to her, never let himself react to the urgings of his glands.

One day, as he left the bridge after another tediously boring stint of duty, Bracknell ducked into the galley for a cup of coffee. Addie was sitting at the little square table, sipping from a steaming mug.

“How’s the coffee today?” Bracknell asked.

“It’s tea.”

“Oh.” He picked out a mug and poured from the ceramic urn, then pulled a chair out and sat next to her. Addie’s eyes flicked to the open hatch and for an instant Bracknell thought she was going to jump to her feet and flee.