though, Addie called to him.
He stopped at the doorway and saw that she was at the minuscule desk in the infirmary’s anteroom, the glow from the desktop screen casting an eerie greenish light on her face.
“You were the chief of the skytower project, weren’t you,” Addie said. It was not a question.
His insides twitched, but Bracknell answered evenly, “Yes. And this is where it got me.”
“Permanently exiled from Earth.”
He nodded wordlessly.
Glancing over her shoulder at the open doorway to the infirmary’s beds, Addie said, “The man you brought in, he keeps mumbling something about the skytower.”
“Lots of people remember the skytower,” Bracknell said bitterly. “It was the biggest disaster in history.”
She shook her head. “But this man is not who he claims to be in his prison file.”
“What do you mean?”
“The patient in the infirmary,” she said, “keeps babbling about the skytower. He says they want to kill him because he knows about the skytower.”
“Knows what?”
Addie’s almond eyes were steady, somber. “I don’t know. But I thought that you would want to speak with him.”
“You’re damned right I do.”
She got up from the desk and Bracknell followed her into the infirmary. Her patient was asleep or unconscious as they squeezed into the cramped compartment. The other bed was unoccupied. Medical monitors beeped softly. The place had that sterile smell of antiseptics overlaying the metallic tang of blood.
Bracknell saw a tall, very slim, long-limbed man stretched out on the narrow infirmary bed. He was still in the clothes he’d been wearing when he’d been hurt: a pair of gray coveralls, wrinkled and dark with perspiration, spattered with his own blood. His face was battered, swollen, a bandage sprayed over one lacerated brow, another along the length of his broken nose. His body was immobilized by the restraining straps, and a slim plastic intravenous tube was inserted in his left forearm.
Addie called up the diagnostic computer and scans of the man’s body sprang up on the wall beside his bed.
“He has severe internal injuries,” she said, in a whisper. “They did a thorough job of beating him. A few more minutes and he would have died.”
“Will he make it?”
“The computer’s prognosis is not favorable. I have called back to Selene to ask for a medevac flight, but I doubt that they will go to the trouble for a prisoner.”
Bracknell asked, “What’s his name?”
“That’s just it,” she said, with a tiny frown that creased the bridge of her nose. “I’m not certain. His prison file shows him as Jorge Quintana, but when I ran a scan of his DNA profile the Earthside records came up with the name Toshikazu Koga.”
“Japanese?”
“Japanese descent, third generation American. Raised in Selene, where he graduated with honors in molecular engineering.”
Bracknell gaped at her. “Nanotechnology?”
“I believe so.”
Bracknell stared down at the unconscious convict. He did not look Asian, there were no epicanthic folds in his closed eyes. Yet there was an odd, unsettling quality about his face. The skin was stretched tight over prominent cheekbones and a square jaw that somehow looked subtly wrong for the rest of his face, as if someone had roughed it out and pasted it onto him. The color of his skin was strange, too, a mottled gray. Bracknell had never seen a skin tone like it.
He looked back at Addie. “Can you wake him up?”
THE PRISONER’S TALE
“They’ll kill me sooner or later,” said Toshikazu Koga, his voice little more than a painfully labored whisper. “There’s no place left that I can run to.”
Bracknell was bending over his infirmary bed to hear him better. Addie sat on the other, unused bed.
“Who wants to kill you?” she asked. “Why?”
“The skytower—”
“What do you know about the skytower?” Bracknell demanded. “I was a loyal follower, a Believer…”
“What about the skytower?”
“I didn’t know. I should have guessed.” Toshikazu coughed. “Truth is, I didn’t want to know.”
It took all of Bracknell’s self-control to keep from grabbing the man by the shoulders and shaking his story out of him.
“What was it that you didn’t want to know?” Addie asked gently.
“All that money. They wouldn’t pay all that money for something legitimate. I should have refused. I should have…” His voice faded away.
“Damn!” Bracknell snapped. “He’s passed out again.”
Addie’s eyes flicked to the monitors on the wall. “We must let him rest.”
“But he knows something about the skytower! Something to do with nanotechnology and the tower.”
Getting up from the bed and looking him squarely in the eyes, Addie said, “We’ll learn nothing from him if he dies. Let him rest. Let me try to save his life.”
Knowing she was right despite his desperate desire to wring the truth out of the unconscious patient, Bracknell nodded tightly. “Let me know when he comes to.”
He got as far as the doorway to the anteroom, then turned. “And don’t let anyone else near him. No one!”
She looked alarmed at the vehemence of his command.
Little by little, in bits and pieces over the next two days, they wormed Toshikazu’s story out of him while Addie repeatedly called to Selene to beg for a medevac mission before
“The best I can do is stabilize him. He’ll die unless he gets proper medical help.”
Bracknell hoped he’d stay alive long enough to reveal what he knew about the skytower.
Toshikazu Koga had been an engineer in Selene’s nanotechnology laboratory, working mainly on nanomachines designed to separate pure metals out of the ores in asteroids. Instead of the rock rats digging out the ores and smelting them the old-fashioned way, nanomachines could pull out individual atoms of a selected metal while the human miners waited and watched from the comforts of their spacecraft.
Toshikazu was also a Believer, a devout, churchgoing member of the New Morality. Although his fellow churchgoers disapproved of nanotechnology, he saw nothing wrong with its practice on the Moon or elsewhere in space.
“It’s not like we’re on Earth, with ten billion people jammed in cheek by jowl,” he would tell those who scowled at his profession. “Here on the Moon nanomachines produce the air we breathe and the water we drink. They separate helium three from the regolith sands to power the fusion generators. And now I’m helping the miners in the Asteroid Belt, making their lives safer and more profitable.”
But there was another side to his nanotech work. His brother Takeo ran a lucrative clinic at the Hell Crater complex, where he used Toshikazu’s knowledge of nanotechnology for medical purposes. Because of his religious beliefs, Toshikazu felt uneasy about his brother’s using nanomachines to help rejuvenate aging men and women. Or for the trivial purposes of cosmetic surgery.
“Why use a scalpel or liposuction,” his brother would ask him, “when you can produce nanobugs that will tighten a sagging jawline or trim a bulging belly?”
