Ben Bova - Mercury

by Mercury(lit)

There was talk of starting a new skytower in Borneo or central Africa.

  " 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world," he muttered to himself. "To sail beyond the sunset."

  "Hey, Waldo," the voice of one of his assistants grated annoyingly in the communication plug in his right ear, "the supply ship is coming in."

  "It's early," Emerson said, without needing to look at the digital clock set into the control board.

  "Early or late, they're here and they want a docking port."

  Emerson glanced up at the working screens, then played his fingers across the keyboard on the panel. One of the screens flicked from an interior view of the bare and empty hotel level upstairs to an outside camera view of a conical Masterson Clippership hovering in co-orbit a few hundred meters from the platform. He frowned at the image.

  "We were expecting an uncrewed supply module," he said into his lip mike.

  "And we got a nice shiny Clippership," his assistant replied. "They got our cargo and they want to offload it and go home."

  Shaking his head slightly, Emerson checked the manifest that the Clippership automatically relayed to the platform's logistics program. It matched what they were expecting.

  "Why'd they use a Clipper?" he wondered aloud.

  "They said the freight booster had a malf and they swapped out the supply module with the Clippership's passenger module."

  It didn't make sense to Emerson, but there was the Clippership waiting to dock and offload its cargo, and the manifest was exactly what they expected.

  "Ours not to reason why," Emerson misquoted. "Hook 'em to docking port three; it's closest to them."

  "Will do."

  Franklin Zachariah hummed a cheerful tune to himself as he sat shoe-homed into the cramped cockpit of the Clippership. The pilot, a Japanese or Vietnamese or some kind of Asian gook, shot an annoyed glance over his shoulder. Hard to tell his nationality, Zach thought, with those black shades he's wearing. Like a mask or some macho android out of a banned terminator flick.

  Zachariah stopped his humming but continued to play the tune in his head. It helped to pass the boring time. He had expected to get spacesick when the rocket went into orbit, but the medication they'd given him was working fine. Zero gravity didn't bother him at all. No upchucks, not even dizziness.

  Zachariah was an American. He did not belong to the New Morality or the Flower Dragon or any other fundamentalist movement. He did not even follow the religion of his forefathers. He found that he couldn't believe in a god who made so many mistakes. He himself was a very clever young man-everyone who had ever met him said so. What they didn't know was that he was also a very destructive fellow.

  Although he'd been born in Brooklyn, when he was six years old and the rising sea level caused by the greenhouse warming finally overwhelmed the city's flood control dams, Zachariah's family fled to distant cousins in the mountains near Charleston, West Virginia. There young Zach, as everyone called him, learned what it meant to be a Jew. At school, the other young boys alternately beat him up and demanded help with their classwork from him. His father, a professor in New York, had to settle for a job as a bookkeeper for his younger cousin, a jeweler in downtown Charleston who was ultimately shot to death in a holdup.

  Zach learned how to avoid beatings by hiring the toughest thugs in school to be his bodyguards. He paid them with money he made from selling illicit drugs that he cooked up in the moldy basement of the house they shared with four other families.

  By the time Zach was a teenager he had become a very accomplished computer hacker. Unlike his acne-ridden friends, who delved into illegal pornographic sites or shut down the entire public school system with a computer virus, Zach used his computer finesse in more secretive and lucrative ways. He pilfered bank accounts. He jiggered police records. He even got the oafish schoolmate who'd been his worst tormentor years earlier arrested by the state police for abetting an abortion. The kid went to jail protesting his innocence, but his own computer files proved his guilt. Cool, Zach said to himself as the bewildered lout was hauled off to a New Morality work camp.

  Zach disdained college. He was having too much fun tweaking the rest of the world. He was the lone genius behind the smallpox scare that forced the head of the Center for Disease Control to resign. He even reached into the files of a careless White House speechwriter and leaked the contents of a whole sheaf of confidential memos, causing mad panic among the president's closest advisors. Way cool.

  Then he discovered the thrill of true destruction. It happened while he was watching a pirated video of the as-yet-unreleased Hollywood re-re-remake of Phantom of the Opera. Zach sat in open-mouthed awe as the Phantom sawed through the chain supporting the opera house's massive chandelier. Cooler than cool! he thought as the ornate collection of crystal crashed into the audience, splattering fat old ladies in their gowns and jewels and fatter old men in black tuxes.

  Franklin Zachariah learned the sheer beauty, the sexual rush, of real destruction. Using acid to weaken a highway bridge so that it collapsed when the morning's traffic of overloaded semis rolled over it. Shorting out an airport's electrical power supply-and its backup emergency generator-in the midst of the evening's busiest hour. Quietly disconnecting the motors that moved the floodgates along a stretch of the lower Potomac so that the storm surge from the approaching hurricane flooded the capital's streets and sent those self-important politicians screaming to pin the blame on someone. Coolissimo.

  Most of the time he worked alone, living off bank accounts here and there that he nibbled at, electronically. For some of the bigger jobs, like the Potomac floodgates, he needed accomplices, of course. But he always kept his identity a secret, meeting his accomplices only through carefully buffered computer links that could not, he was sure, be traced back to him.

  It was a shock, then, when a representative of the Flower Dragon movement contacted him about the skytower. But Zach got over his shock when they described to him the coolest project of them all. He quickly asked for the detailed schematics of the skytower and began to study hard.

  THE APPROACH

  Lara and Bracknell were driving one of the project's electric-powered minivans to the Quito airport. Bracknell planned to attend Skytower Corporation's board meeting and the news conference at which they would make the announcement that the tower was ready for operations. Then they would stay for a weekend of interviews and publicity events and return to Quito the following Monday.

  "You sure you don't want to get married in Paris?" he asked her, grinning happily as he drove the quiet minivan down the steep, gravel-surfaced road. "We could have the ceremony at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Be kind of symbolic."

  Trucks and buses ground by in the opposite direction, raising clouds of gritty gray dust as they headed uphill toward Sky City.

  Lara shook her head. "I tried to get through all the red tape on the computer link, Mance, but it's hopeless. We'd have to stay two weeks, at least."

  "The French want our tourist dollars."

  "And they want to do their own blood tests, their own searches of our citizenship data. I think they even check Interpol for criminal records."

  "So we'll get married when we come back," he said easily.

  "And we can invite our families and friends."

  "I'll ask Victor if he can come back for the occasion and be my best man."

  Lara made no reply.

  "Hey! Why don't we ask Rev. Danvers to perform the ceremony?"

  "At his new chapel?"

  "Unless you'd rather do it in the cathedral in Quito."

  "No," Lara said. "Let's do it at the base of the tower. Rev. Danvers will be fine."

  He wanted to kiss her; he even considered pulling off on the shoulder of the road to do it. Instead, he drove in silence for a while, grinning happily. The road became paved as they neared Quito's airport. Traffic built up. Lara turned in her seat and looked out the rear window.

  "It's going to feel strange not seeing the tower in the sky," she sai
d.

  "It'll be there when we get back," Bracknell said easily. "For the next few days you'll just have to settle for the Eiffel Tower."

  "Docking confirmed," said the Clippership's copilot. He was wearing dark glasses, too, like the pilot. Zach thought he looked kind of like an Asian, but his accent sounded California or some other part of the States.

  "Tell the tower crew they can begin unloading," the pilot replied.

  Zach knew what that meant. The Clipper was attached to the sky-tower now by a docking adaptor, a short piece of insulated tunnel that linked the tower's airlock to the Clipper's cargo hatch. A team of technicians from the skytower would come through the adaptor and begin unloading the Clipper's cargo bay. Zach thought of them as chimps doing stupid monkey tasks.

  Unseen by the tower personnel, a dozen men and women recruited from god knows where would exit one of the Clippership's other airlocks, in spacesuits, of course, carrying the Clipper's real cargo: fifty tiny capsules of nanomachines, gobblers programmed to tear apart carbon molecules such as buckyballs. Zach had spent months studying the schematics of the skytower that the Flower Dragon people had supplied him, calculating just how to bring the tower down. They had balked at first when he suggested gobblers; nanotechnology was anathema to them. But someone higher up in the organization had overridden their objections and provided the highly dangerous gobblers for Zach's project of destruction.

  Now twelve religious fanatics were out there playing with nanomachines that could kill them if they weren't careful. Each of the EVA team bore a minicam attached to his or her helmet, so Zach could direct their actions from the safety of the cockpit, securely linked to the outside crew by hair-thin optical fibers that carried his radio commands with no chance that they'd be overheard by the guys in the tower.

  Now comes the fun part, Zach thought as he powered up the laptop he would use for communicating with the EVA team.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson was also remotely watching the unloading, still wondering why the supply contractor had gone to the expense of hiring a shiny new Clippership instead of sending up another automated freighter.

  "In faith, 'twas strange," he murmured as he stood in the control center, " 'twas passing strange."

  "You spouting poetry again?" his assistant asked.

  Emerson considered yanking the comm plug out of his ear, but knew that would be the wrong thing to do. Instead he asked, "How's it going?"

  "It's going. Riley and his guys are pushin' the packages through the hatch and I'm checkin' 'em off as they come in. Nothing much to it. Just a lot of muscle work. Trained chimps could do this."

  Emerson could see the bored team on one of the working screens, gliding the weightless big crates along through the adaptor tunnel.

  "Well just be careful in there," he said. "Just because we're in zero-g doesn't mean those packages don't have mass. Get caught between a crate and a wall and you'll get your ribs caved in, just like on Earth."

  "I know that." His assistant sounded impatient, waspish.

  "Just make sure your chimpanzees know it."

  "What? No poetry for the occasion?"

  Emerson immediately snapped, "A fool and his ribcage are soon parted."

  Zach was humming tunelessly to himself as he called up the schematics and matched them with the camera views from his EVA team. The connection between the geostationary platform and the tower's main cables was the crucial point. Sever that link and some thirty-five thousand kilometers of skytower go crashing down to Earth. And the other thirty-five thou, on the other side of the platform, goes spinning off into space, carrying the platform with it.

  He suppressed the urge to giggle, knowing it would annoy the sour-faced pilots sitting as immobile as statues an arm's reach in front of him. I'm going to wipe out the biggest structure anybody's ever built! Wham! And down it goes.

  It'll probably fall onto Quito, Zach reasoned. Kill a million people, maybe. Like the hammer of god slamming them flat. Like a big boot squishing bugs.

  The culmination of my career, Zach thought. But nobody will know that I did it. Nobody really knows who I am. Not anybody who counts. But they will after this. I'm going to stand up and tell the world that I did this. Me. Franklin Zachariah. The terror of terrors. Dr. Destruction.

  Lara was wearing open-weave huaraches instead of regular shoes, Bracknell realized as they inched along the line at the airport's security site. He frowned as he thought that they'd probably want him to take off his boots before going through the metal detector.

  Damned foolishness, he said to himself. There hasn't been a terrorist threat at an airport in more than twenty years but they still go through this goddamned nonsense.

  Sure enough, the stocky, stern-faced security guard pointed silently to Bracknell's boots as Lara sailed unbothered through the metal detector's arch. Grumbling, Bracknell tugged the boots off and thumped them down on the conveyor belt that ran through the X-ray machine.

  He set off the metal detector's alarm anyway and had to be searched by a pair of grim-looking guards. He had forgotten the handheld computer/phone he was carrying in his shirt pocket.

  "No, no," Zach said sharply into his laptop's microphone. "Just open the capsule and wedge it into the cable. That's all you have to do, the nanobugs'll do the rest."

  The job was taking much longer than he'd expected. Fifty cables, that's all we have to break, Zach grumbled silently, and these chimps are taking all fucking day to do it.

  The underside of the geostationary platform looked like an immense spiderweb to Zach as he peered at it through the cameras of his EVA team. It matched the specs in his files almost exactly; there were always slight deviations between the blueprints and the actual construction. Nobody can build anything this big without straying from the plans here and there, at least a little bit.

  Zach knew that the tower's main support came from these cables, stretched taught by centrifugal force as the whole gigantic assembly swung through space in synchrony with the Earth's daily spin. Break that connection here at the geostationary level and the stretching force disappears. The tower will collapse to the ground while the equally-long upper section goes spinning out into space.

  Fifty cables, he repeated to himself. Let those nanobugs eat through fifty cables and the others won't have the strength to hold the rig together. Fifty cables.

  Emerson's ear plug chimed softly with the tone he knew came from the safety officer.

  "Go ahead," he said into his lip mike.

  "Got something strange goin' on here."

  "What?"

  "That Clipper you've got docked. It's venting gases."

  "Venting?"

  "Hydrogen and oxygen, from what the laser spectrometer tells me."

  Emerson thought a moment. "Bleeding a nearly-empty tank, maybe?"

  The safety officer's voice sounded troubled. "This isn't a bleed. They're pumpin' out a lot of gas. Like the propellant they'd be using for their return trip."

  "Curiouser and curiouser," Emerson quoted.

  Zach licked his lips. The fifty cables were now being eaten away by the gobblers. He had calculated that blowing thirty of the cables would be enough to do the job, but he'd gone for fifty as an extra precaution. Okay, we've got fifty and we're all set.

  He looked up at the two Asian pilots, still wearing those cool dark shades. "The nanomachines are in place."

  "Good."

  "All the EVA guys are back inside?"

  "That is not your responsibility."

  Zach felt the pilot was being snotty. "Okay," he said, "if any of them get eaten by the bugs, you write the condolence letters."

  "Start the nanomachines working," the pilot said, without turning to look at Zach.

  "They are working."

  "Very well."

  "Shouldn't we disconnect from the dock now?"

  "No. Not yet."

  THE COLLAPSE

  Zach thought it was a little weird to stay connected to the tower's geostationary docking tunnel whil
e the nanomachines were chewing away at the cables, but he figured the pilot knew what he was doing. The bugs won't get the chance to damage the Clippership; we'll disconnect before we're in any danger, he was pretty certain.

  Besides, these two black-goggled pilots aren't going to kill themselves, Zach further assured himself. Not knowingly.

  Outside the ship there was no sound. No vibration. Nothing.

  For the first time, the pilot turned in his seat and lifted his glasses to glare directly at Zach. "Well? Have you done it?"

  "Yeah," Zach replied, feeling nettled. "It's done. Now get us the hell out of here before the upper half of the tower starts spinning off to Alpha Centauri."

  "That won't be necessary," said the pilot.