Mercury

still they sneak in and rip off parts.”

Bracknell closed his eyes, trying to keep his temper under control. No sense getting angry with Danvers; he can’t help the situation. Get to the point, tell him why you’ve contacted him.

He took a breath, then plunged in. “I was wondering, hoping, that you might get a message to Lara Tierney for me,” he said, embarrassed at how much it sounded like begging. “I don’t know where she is now, but I thought perhaps you could find her and give her a message for me.”

Then he waited. His shift on the bridge ended and his replacement arrived at the comm console but the captain silently waved the woman away. Bracknell sat there attending to the ship’s normal communications while his eyes constantly flicked back to the screen where Bishop Danvers’s image sat frozen.

At last the attention light beneath that screen went from orange to green. The bishop’s image shimmered slightly and became animated. But his expression looked doubtful, uncertain.

“Mance, she’s Lara Molina now. She and Victor married more than eighteen months ago. I performed the ceremony.”

Bracknell felt his face redden with sudden anger.

“Under the circumstances,” Bishop Danvers continued, “I don’t think it would be wise for you to contact her. After all, it would be illegal, wouldn’t it? And there’s no sense bringing up old heartaches, opening old wounds. After all, it’s taken her all this time to get you out of her mind and begin her life again. Don’t you agree that it would be better if you—”

Bracknell cut the connection with a vicious stab of his thumb on the keyboard.

Married, his mind echoed. She married Victor. The man who betrayed me. And that pompous idiot performed the ceremony. He betrayed me, too. They’ve all betrayed me!

REVELATION

For weeks Bracknell stormed through his duties aboard Alhambra, raging inwardly at Molina and Danvers. He wanted to be angry with Lara, too; he wanted to be furious with her. Yet he found he couldn’t be. He couldn’t expect her to live out the rest of her life alone. But with Victor? She married that lying, back-stabbing son of a bitch? She doesn’t realize that Victor betrayed me, Bracknell told himself; Lara doesn’t know that Victor lied in his testimony at the trial. But Victor knew, and so did Danvers. Of that Bracknell was certain. They had combined to put him out of the way so that Victor could have Lara for himself.

Bracknell understood it all now. Victor betrayed him because he wanted Lara for himself. Once the skytower collapsed, Victor had the perfect opportunity to get me out of his way forever. And Danvers helped him, of that Bracknell was certain.

Once the skytower collapsed, he repeated to himself. Could they have made the tower collapse? Caused it? Sabotaged it? Bracknell wrestled with that idea for weeks on end. No. How could they? Victor didn’t know enough about the tower’s construction to bring it down. He’s a biologist, not a structural engineer. It would take a team of trained saboteurs, demolition experts. It would take money and planning and a ruthless cold-bloodedness that was frighteningly beyond Victor’s capability. Or Danvers’s. He doubted that even the New Morality at its most fanatical had the viciousness to deliberately bring the tower down. Or the competence.

No, Bracknell concluded. Victor simply took advantage of his opportunity. Took advantage of me. And Danvers helped him.

Still, his rage boiled inside him, made him morose and curt with everyone around him, even Addie. The captain watched his new attitude and said nothing, except once, when Bracknell was assigned to escorting a new group of convicts into their makeshift quarters down in the hold. One of the prisoners started a scuffle with another one. Bracknell dove into them swinging his stun wand like a club and beat them both unconscious.

“You’re starting to come back to life,” the captain said after a pair of husky crewmen had pulled him off the bleeding prisoners. He made a strange, twisted smile. “You’re starting to feel pain again.”

“I’ve felt pain before,” Bracknell muttered as they trudged up the passageway toward the bridge.

“Maybe,” said the captain. “But now you can feel the demon gnawing at your guts. Now you know how I felt when they killed my wife. How I still feel.”

Bracknell stared at him with new understanding.

Back and forth through the Belt sailed Alhambra, and then set out on the long, tedious journey to Earth to deliver refined metals and pick up convicts. It seemed to Bracknell, when he thought about it, that there were always more convicts waiting to be sent out to the Belt, always more men and women who’d run afoul of the law. Teenagers, too. The governments of Earth had found a convenient way to get rid of troublemakers: dump them out in the Asteroid Belt. They must be making the laws tighter all the time, more restrictive, he thought. Or maybe they’re just using banishment to the Belt instead of other punishments.

On one of Alhambra’s stops at Earth, still another set of convicts was herded into the empty cargo hold—sixteen men and eleven women, most of them looking too frightened to cause any trouble. Only two of the bunch had been guilty of violent crimes: a strong-arm mugger and a murderer who had stabbed her boyfriend to death.

Bracknell was surprised, then, when the alarm hooted shortly after they had locked the prisoners in the hold. From his duty station on the bridge he looked over at the intercom screen. Two men were beating up a third, a tall, skinny scarecrow of a man. He saw their hapless victim trying to defend himself by wrapping his long arms around his head, but his two attackers knocked him to the metal deck with a rain of vicious body blows, then began kicking him.

“Get down there!” the captain snapped to Bracknell as he tapped on the controls set into the armrest of his command chair. Bracknell jumped up from his own seat, ducked through the hatch and sprinted toward the hold. He knew that the captain was dropping the air pressure in there hard enough to pop eardrums. They’ll all be unconscious by the time I get to the hold, he thought.

He could hear the footfalls of two other crewmen following him down the passageway. Stopping at the hatch only long enough to slip on the oxygen masks hanging on the wall, the three of them opened the hatch and pulled out three of the unconscious bodies: the bloodied scarecrow and his two attackers. Leaving the other crewmen to deal with the attackers, Bracknell picked up the victim and started running toward the infirmary. The man was as light as a bird, nothing but skin and bones.

Addie was waiting at the infirmary. She allowed Bracknell to lay the unconscious man on one of the two beds there as she powered up the diagnostic sensors built into the bulkhead.

“You should get back to the bridge,” she said to Bracknell as she began strapping the man down.

“As soon as he’s secure,” Bracknell said, fastening a strap across the man’s frail chest. “He’s a prisoner, after all.”

The man moaned wretchedly but did not open his eyes. Bracknell saw that they were both swollen shut, and his nose appeared to be broken. Blood covered most of his face and was spattered over his gray prison-issue coveralls.

“Go!” Addie said in an urgent whisper. “I can take care of him now.”

Bracknell headed back to the bridge. By the time he slid back into the chair before his console, he could see that the other convicts were stirring in the hold, regaining consciousness as the air pressure returned to normal. The two attackers were already sealed into hardshell space-suits and being dragged to an airlock.

“What started the fight?” he wondered aloud.

“What difference does it make?” the captain retorted. “It wasn’t much of a fight, anyway. Looked to me like those two gorillas wanted to beat the scarecrow to death. He probably tried to proposition them.”

Half an hour later Bracknell punched up the outside camera view. One of the spacesuited figures was floating inertly at the end of a buckyball tether. The other had crawled along the length of his tether and was pounding at the airlock hatch with a gloved fist.

“Too bad there’s no radio in his suit,” the captain remarked sourly. “I imagine we’d pick up some choice vocabulary.”

Once his shift was finished, Bracknell headed for his quarters. As he passed the open door of the infirmary,