Mercury

He began to protest, “Your father—”

“—Is busy seeing off the rescue team,” Addie interrupted. “And there are no cameras in my quarters; I’ve made certain of that.”

“But I shouldn’t be in here alone with you.”

“Are you afraid?” She grinned impishly.

“Damned right!”

The compartment was much like his own quarters: a bunk, a built-in desk and dresser, accordion-pleat doors for the closet and lavatory.

Addie touched the control panel on the wall and the overhead lights turned off, leaving only the lamp on the bedside table.

“Addie, this is wrong.” But he heard the blood pulsing through his body, felt his heart pounding.

She stood before him, smiling knowingly. “Don’t you like me, Mance? Not even a little?”

“It’s not that—”

“Today is my seventeenth birthday, Mance. I am legally an adult now. And rather wealthy, you know. I can control my own dowry now. I can make my own decisions.”

She reached up to the tab at the throat of her coveralls and slid the zipper all the way down to her crotch. She wasn’t wearing a bra, he saw. Her body was young and full and beckoning.

“I love you, Mance,” Addie murmured, stepping up to him and sliding her arms around his neck.

He clutched her and pulled her close and kissed her upturned face.

And heard the door behind him burst open with a furious roar from Captain Farad. Before Bracknell could turn to face her father, he felt the searing pain of a stun wand at full charge and blacked out as he slumped to the floor.

Aboard Hiryu the elderly Japanese assassin composed a final message to Nobuhiko Yamagata. He encrypted the video himself, a task which took no little time, even with the aid of the ship’s computer:

“Most illustrious master: The last individual is now in our care. He will be treated as required. Unfortunately, he has probably contaminated the vessel in which we found him. Therefore that vessel will be dealt with. This will be my last transmission to you or anyone in this life. Sayonara.”

When Bracknell came back to consciousness he was already in a hardshell suit, its helmet sealed to the neck ring. The captain was glaring at him, his eyes raging with fury.

“I told you to keep away from her!” he screamed at Bracknell, loud enough to penetrate the helmet’s thick insulation. “I warned you!”

“Where is she? What have you done—”

“She’s in her quarters, crying. She’ll get over it. I’ll have to marry her off sooner than I planned, but it’ll be better than having her throw herself at scum like you.”

Bracknell felt himself being hauled to his feet and realized there were at least two other crewmen behind him. His legs wouldn’t function properly; the stun wand’s charge was still scrambling his nervous system.

“Drag him down to the auxiliary airlock,” the captain snarled. “That goddamn Hiryu is still connected to the main lock.”

“But I didn’t do anything!” Bracknell protested.

“The hell you didn’t!”

Like a sack of limp laundry Bracknell was hauled along the passageway and into the airlock. The captain clipped a tether to the waist of his spacesuit and handed him the loose end.

“You can find a cleat for yourself and clip onto it. Otherwise you can float out to infinity, for all I care.”

Bracknell tottered uncertainly in the hard-shell suit. His legs tingled as if they’d been asleep. He’s going to kill me! he thought. I’m going to die out there! There’s no way I can survive in a suit all the way out to the Belt. Even if he sends out more air and food how can I—

The inner airlock hatch slammed shut and Bracknell felt through the thick soles of his boots the pump starting to chug the air out of the darkened metal chamber. In less than a minute the pump stopped and the outer hatch swung open silently.

Bracknell saw the cold distant stars staring at him. On unsteady legs still twitching from the stun charge, he clumped to the lip of the hatch. Peering out along the ship’s skin, he saw a set of cleats within arm’s reach. For a moment he thought of refusing to go outside. I’ll just stay here in the airlock, he told himself. Then he realized that the captain would simply have a few men suit up and throw him out, maybe without even the tether. So, like a man going through the motions of a nightmare, he attached the end of his tether to the nearest cleat and then stepped out into nothingness. The airlock hatch slid shut behind him.

He glided silently as the tether unreeled, then was pulled up short. A sardonic voice in his head mocked, You’re at the end of your tether. A helluva way to die. He realized that despite his contemplation of suicide, despite Addie’s tutoring him in the desirelessness of the Buddhist path, he very much wanted to live.

Why? Why not just open the seal of this helmet and end it all here and now? The answer rose in his mind like the fireball of a nuclear explosion: Vengeance. Victor and Danvers had betrayed him. And Yamagata was the biggest bastard of them all. Yamagata had brought down the skytower, and that had given Victor the opportunity to steal Lara from him.

Molina. Danvers. Yamagata. He would live to work his vengeance on them. But you won’t live long enough to succeed, that mocking inner voice told him.

Looking around as he floated in the emptiness he saw, on the far side of Alhambra’s curving hull, that the other ship was still linked. What was its name? Hiryu, the captain had said. Flying dragon. Why would it still be connected? If they intend to bring Toshikazu back to Selene they ought to light off as quickly as they can.

Then Bracknell remembered that Hiryu was a Yamagata vessel. And Yamagata certainly wasn’t here to help Toshikazu recover from his wounds.

The silent explosion blinded him, but it did not surprise him.

DEATH AND TRANSFUGURATION

Whirling blindly through space, Bracknell knew for certain that he was a dead man now.

He could feel himself spinning giddily. The explosion must have torn my tether free of Alhambra, he thought. I’ll twirl like this forever. I’ll probably be the first man to reach Alpha Centauri, even though I’ll be too dead to know it.

Then the realization hit him. Addie! The captain. All the people on Alhambra. Did the bastards kill everybody? Madly he tried to paw at his tear-filled eyes; his gloved hands bumped into the thick quartz visor of his helmet. Blinking furiously, he tried to force his vision to return. All he saw was the searing after- image of the explosion’s fireball. They wouldn’t have blown up the whole ship, he said to himself. Why would they? They wanted Toshikazu and they got him. Why the explosion? An accident?

No, he realized. They suspected that Toshikazu had been talking to us. They wanted no witnesses, nobody left alive. Dead men tell no tales. Neither do dead women, even if they’re only seventeen years old. His eyes filled with tears again, but now he was sobbing for Addie, killed because of me. The final casualty of the skytower. They killed her and everybody else because of me.

Then he thought of Yamagata. I didn’t kill them, Bracknell reminded himself. He did. Yamagata. He’s back on Earth, living in luxury, with the blood of millions on his hands.

Slowly his vision returned. Eventually he could see the wreckage of Alhambra spreading outward like dandelion seeds puffed by the wind. It was dwindling, dwindling as he himself spiraled away through space.

Yamagata did this. Bracknell kept the image of Saito Yamagata in the forefront of his mind. It kept him alive, gave him a reason to keep on breathing. He had never met the mighty founder of Yamagata Corporation, but he had seen vids of the man on the news net. Yamagata was supposed to have retreated to some monastery in Tibet, Bracknell remembered, but the newscasters smugly reported that this was just a ruse. The old man was still