with some pride. The base spread across several square kilometers of the immense crater’s floor, domes and tunnels and the tangled tracks of many vehicles. The work of my mind, he said to himself. The base is almost finished, and I did it. I created it. With a little help from my nanofriends. Like the skytower, taunted a voice in his mind.
That night, he lay in his bunk and watched the Earthside news broadcasts while the Martian wind moaned softly past the plastic dome that housed the construction crew. Then he saw an item that made him sit straight up in bed.
Saito Yamagata was going to start a project to build solar power satellites in orbit around the planet Mercury.
Yamagata! He’s come out of his so-called retreat in Tibet and he’s heading for Mercury.
Without a moment’s hesitation, without a heartbeat of reflection, Alexios decided he would go to Mercury, too. He owed Yamagata a death. And as he sat in his darkened bedroom, the flickering light from the video screen playing across his transformed features, he realized that he could pay back both Victor and Danvers, too.
All the old hatred, all the old fury, all the old seething acid boiled up anew in his guts. Alexios felt his teeth grinding together. I’ll make them pay, he promised himself. I had almost forgotten about them, about what they did to me and all those millions of others. Almost forgotten Addie and her father and the others aboard
He threw back the bed covers and strode naked to his desktop phone. Yamagata. Molina. Danvers. I’ll get all three of them on that hellhole of a world, Mercury.
GOETHE BASE
Sitting in his bare little office, Dante Alexios smiled bitterly to himself as the memories of his ten lost years came flooding back to him. He finished reading the report issued by McFergusen and his ICU committee and leaned back in his desk chair. They’ve worded it very diplomatically, Alexios thought as he read the final paragraph, but their meaning is clear.
The aforementioned tests unequivocally show that the rocks in question originated on Mars. While there is a vanishingly small chance that they were deposited on Mercury’s surface by natural processes, the overwhelming likelihood is that they were transported to Mercury by human hands. The discovery of biomarkers in these samples by V. Molina is not, therefore, indicative of biological activity on the planet Mercury.
Victor is wiped out, Alexios said to himself, with satisfaction. McFergusen won’t come right out and say it, but the implication is crystal clear: either Victor planted those rocks here himself, or he fell dupe to some prankster who did it. Either way, Victor’s reputation as a scientist is permanently demolished.
Laughing out loud, Alexios thought, Now it’s your turn, Danvers.
He put in a call to Molina, to start the process of destroying Bishop Elliott Danvers.
As he strode down the central corridor of the orbiting
Still, he hesitated once he arrived at the door to their stateroom, his fist in midair poised to knock. What will I do if she does recognize me? he asked himself. What will you do if she doesn’t? replied the scornful voice in his head.
He took a breath, then knocked. Lara opened the door immediately, as if she had been standing behind it waiting anxiously for him.
He had to swallow before he could say, “Hello, Mrs. Molina.”
“Mr. Alexios.” Her voice was hushed, apprehensive. “Won’t you come in?”
Feeling every fiber of his body quivering nervously, Alexios stepped into their compartment. Victor was sitting on the two-place sofa set against the far bulkhead, his head in his hands. The bed was neatly made up; everything in the stateroom seemed in fastidious order. Except for Molina: he looked a wreck, hair mussed, face ashen, a two-day stubble on his jaw, dark rings under his eyes.
Alexios relaxed somewhat. This isn’t going to be difficult at all. He’s ready to clutch at any straw I can offer.
Lara asked, “Can I get you something, Mr. Alexios?”
“Dante,” he said. “Please call me Dante.”
With a nod, she said, “Very well, Dante. A drink, maybe?”
His memory flashed a picture of all the times he and Lara had drunk together. She’d been partial to margaritas in the old days; Mance Bracknell had a taste for wine.
“Just some water, please,” he said.
“Fruit juice?” she suggested.
He almost shuddered with the recollection of the nanomachine-laden juice he had drunk in Koga’s clinic. “Water will be fine, thank you.”
Lara went to the kitchenette built behind a short bar next to the sofa. Alexios pulled up one of the plush chairs and sat across the coffee table from Molina.
“As I said on the phone, Dr. Molina, I’m here to help you in any way I can.”
Molina shook his head. “There isn’t anything you can do,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“Someone set you up for this,” Alexios said gently. “If we can find out who did it, that would show everyone that you’re not at fault.”
Lara placed a tray of glasses on the coffee table and sat next to her husband. “That’s what I’ve been telling him. We can’t just take this lying down. We’ve got to find out who’s responsible for this.”
“What can you do?” Molina asked morosely.
Alexios tilted his head slightly, as if thinking about the problem. “Well… you said you received an anonymous call about the rocks.”
“Yes. Somebody left a message for me at my office on campus. No name. No return address.”
“And on the strength of that one call you came out here to Mercury?”
Anger flared in Molina’s eyes. “Don’t you start, too! Yes, I came here on the strength of that one call. It sounded too good to be ignored.”
Lara laid a placating hand on his knee. “Victor, he’s trying to help you,” she said soothingly.
Molina visibly choked back his anger. “I figured that if it’s a blind alley I could be back home in a couple of weeks. But if it is was real, it would be a terrific discovery.”
“But it was a deliberate hoax,” Alexios said, as sympathetically as he could manage.
“That’s right. And they all think I did it. They think I’m a fraud, a cheat, a—”
“The thing to do,” Alexios said, cutting through Molina’s rising bitterness, “is to track down who made that call.”
“I don’t see how—”
“Whoever it was had access to Martian rocks,” Alexios went on. “And he probably knew you.”
“What makes you think that?” Lara asked, surprise showing clearly in her amber eyes.
With a small shrug, Alexios replied, “He called you, no one else. He wanted you, specifically you, to come here and be his victim.”
“Who would do such a thing?” Lara wondered. “And why?”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out.”
EVIDENCE
Alexios knew he had to work fast, because Lara and Victor were due to leave Mercury in a few days. Yet he
