Ben Bova - Mercury

by Mercury(lit)

  "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, 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 Alhambra coasted too far from the Moon.

  "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?"

  Toshikazu knew that his brother was doing more than lifting breasts and buttocks. Men would come to him furtively, asking to have their faces completely changed. Takeo accepted their money and never asked why they wanted to alter their appearance. Toshikazu knew they were criminals t
rying to escape the law.

  He was surprised, then, when a pair of churchmen visited him in his laboratory in Selene.

  "At first I thought they wanted me to give them evidence against my brother," he whispered painfully to Bracknell from his infirmary bed. "But no... it was worse than that..."

  One of the churchmen was a high official of the New Morality. The other was a Chinese member of the Flower Dragon movement. What they wanted was a set of nanomachines that could destroy buckyball fibers.

  Bracknell clutched at the injured man's arm when he heard that, making him yowl so loud that Addie rushed in to see what had happened.

  "You'll kill him!" she screamed at Bracknell.

  "I... I'm sorry," he stammered. "I didn't mean to hurt him."

  Toshikazu lay on the bed, his eyes glazed with pain. Addie demanded that Bracknell leave the infirmary.

  "I'll tell you when you can come back," she said.

  For a moment he thought he'd push her out of his way and get the rest of the story from the injured man. Then he took a deep breath and wordlessly left the infirmary.

  All that night his mind seethed with what Toshikazu was telling him. He checked in at the infirmary on his way to the bridge the next morning, but Addie would not let him past the anteroom. "Let him rest," she said. "He'll be no use to you dead."

  Bracknell could hardly keep his attention on his duties. The captain snarled at him several times for his mental lapses. Then a message came in from another vessel, a Yamagata torch ship named Hiryu. Bracknell saw on the comm console's main screen an aged Japanese man with long snow-white hair flowing past his shoulders.

  "We have heard your call for a medical evacuation," said the white-haired man. "We can reach you in six hours and evacuate your injured prisoner."

  Bracknell was tempted to tell the man not to bother; he didn't want Toshikazu removed from Alhambra until he'd gotten his full story out of him. But, feeling the captain's eyes on his back, he dutifully switched the call to the captain's screen. In two minutes they had agreed for Hiryu to pick up the convict and ferry him back to Selene's medical center.

  "Hiryu," the captain muttered after the call was terminated. "That means 'flying dragon' in Japanese, I think."

  As soon as his shift was finished, Bracknell hurried down the passageway to the infirmary. Addie wasn't in the anteroom; he saw her bending over Toshikazu's bed. He could see from the tortured look on her face that something was very wrong.

  "He's dying," she said.

  "A ship is on its way to pick him up," Bracknell said, torn between his need to hear Toshikazu's full story and a humanitarian instinct to get proper medical care for the man. "It'll be here in less than four hours."

  "Thank the gods," breathed Addie.

  "Is he awake?"

  She nodded. Bracknell pushed past her to the injured man's bedside. Toshikazu's eyes were open, but they looked unfocused, dazed from the analgesics Addie had been pumping into him.

  "I've got to know," Bracknell said, bending over him. "What did those church people want from you? What did you do for them?"

  "Gobblers," Toshikazu whispered.

  Bracknell heard Addie, behind him, draw in her breath. She knew what gobblers were. Nanomachines that disassembled molecules, tore them apart atom by atom. Gobblers had been used as murder weapons, ripping apart protein molecules.

  "To break up the buckyball fibers of the skytower?" Bracknell asked urgently.

  Toshikazu nodded and closed his eyes.

  "Gobblers are illegal," said Addie. "Even in Selene..."

  "But you made them, didn't you?" Bracknell said to Toshikazu.

  He understood it all now. Gobblers tore apart the skytower's structure at the geostationary level. That's why the lower half of the tower collapsed while the upper half went spinning off into deep space. And the evidence was at the bottom of the Atlantic's midocean ridge, being melted away by the hot magma boiling into the ocean water.

  "I made... gobblers... for them," Toshikazu admitted, his eyes still closed.

  "You made the gobblers for the Flower Dragon people?" Bracknell asked. "Or for the New Morality?"

  With a weary shake of his head, Toshikazu replied, "Neither. They were... merely the agents... for..."

  "For who?"

  "Yamagata."

  Bracknell gaped at the dying man. Yamagata Corporation. Of course! It would take a powerful interplanetary corporation to plan and execute the destruction of the skytower.

  "Yamagata," Toshikazu repeated. "I was the last... the last one to know..."

  Addie looked up at Bracknell. "Now we know."

  "No!" said Toshikazu. "I've told you... nothing. Nothing. I died... without telling you... anything. If they thought you knew..."

  His eyes closed. His head slumped to one side.

  And Bracknell said, "Yamagata."

  CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  Bracknell was still in the infirmary with Addie and the unconscious Toshikazu when the rescue team from Hiryu came in, led by Captain Farad. The elderly Japanese man was accompanied by two young muscular types, also Asian, who gently lifted Toshikazu onto a stretcher and carried him away.

  The old man stayed and asked Addie for Toshikazu's medical file. She popped the chip from the computer storage and handed it to him.

  With a sibilant hiss of thanks, the old man pushed his long hair back away from his face and asked her, "Does this chip include audio data, perhaps?"

  "Audio data?" asked Addie.

  "You must have spoken to him extensively while he was under your care," said the old man. "Are your conversations included in this chip?"

  She glanced at Bracknell, who said, "He was unconscious most of the time. When he did talk, it was mostly rambling, incomprehensible."

  "I see." The old man looked from Bracknell's face to Addie's and then back again. "I see," he repeated.

  Captain Farad, impatient as usual, asked, "Is there anything else you need?"

  The old man stroked his chin for a moment, as though thinking it over. "No," he said at last. "I believe I have everything I need."

  He left with the captain.

  Addie broke into a pleased smile. "I think we saved his life, Mance."

  "Maybe," Bracknell said, still gazing at the open hatch where the captain and the Japanese elder had left.

  "There's nothing more to do here," said Addie. "I'm going to my quarters and take a good long shower."

  Bracknell nodded.

  "Will you walk me home?" she asked, smiling up at him.

  Her quarters were down the passageway; his own a dozen meters farther. When they got to her door, Addie clutched at his arm and tugged him into her compartment.

  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 c
lose 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: