Ben Bova - Mercury

by Mercury(lit)

  The courtroom was jammed, Bracknell saw as he came in, escorted by the soldiers. From the video screen in his isolation room he'd been unable to see how many people attended the trial. Now he realized there were reporters and camerapersons from all over the world wedged along both side walls. The benches were packed with people, most of them dour, dark Ecuadorians who stared at him with loathing. Looking for my blood, Bracknell realized.

  Lara jumped to her feet as he entered; Molina rose more slowly. Both of Bracknell's attorneys stood up, too, looking as if they were attending a funeral. They are, Bracknell thought. Once he got to his chair Lara leaned across the mahogany railing separating them and threw her arms around his neck.

  "I'm with you, darling," she whispered into his ear. "No matter what happens, I'm with you."

  Bracknell drank in the warmth of her body, the scent of her. But his eyes bore into Molina's, who glared back angrily at him.

  Why is Victor sore at me? Bracknell asked himself. What's he got to be pissed about? He betrayed me; I haven't done anything to him.

  "Everyone stand," called the court announcer.

  The judges filed in, their robes looking newer and darker than Bracknell remembered them. Their faces were dark, too.

  Once everyone was properly seated, the chief judge picked up a single sheet of paper from the desk before him. Bracknell noted that his hand trembled slightly.

  "The prisoner will stand."

  Bracknell got to his feet, feeling as if he were about to face a firing squad.

  "It is the judgment of this court that you, Mance Bracknell, are responsible for the deaths of more than four million human souls, and the destruction of many hundreds of billions of dollars in property."

  Bracknell felt nothing. It was as if he were outside his own body, watching this foreordained drama from a far distance.

  "Since your crime was not willful murder, the death sentence will not be considered."

  A stir rippled through the packed courtroom. "He killed my whole family!" a woman's voice screeched in Spanish.

  "Silence!" roared the judge, with a power in his voice that stilled the crowd. "This is a court of justice. The law will prevail."

  The courtroom went absolutely silent.

  "Mance Bracknell, you have been found guilty of more than four million counts of negligent homicide. It is the decision of this court that you be exiled from this planet Earth forever, so that you can never again threaten the lives of innocent men, women, and children."

  Bracknell's knees sagged beneath him. He leaned on the tabletop for support.

  "This case is closed," said the judge.

  BOOK III

  EXILED

  Beware the fury of a patient man.

  LEAVING EARTH

  They wasted no time hustling Bracknell off the planet. Within two days of his trial's inevitable conclusion, a squad of hard-faced soldiers took him from his prison cell to a van and out to the Quito airport, where a Clippership was waiting to carry him into orbit.

  The airport looked relatively undamaged, Bracknell saw from the window of the van, except for the big plywood sheets where the sweeping windows had been. It's a wonder the crash didn't trigger earthquakes, he thought.

  The soldiers marched him through the terminal building, people turning to stare at him as they strode to the Clippership gate. Bracknell was not shackled, not even handcuffed, but everyone recognized him. He saw the look in their eyes, the expressions on their faces: hatred, anger, even fear-as if he were a monster that terrified their nightmares.

  Lara was waiting at the terminal gate, wearing black, as if she were attending a funeral. She is, Bracknell thought. Mine.

  She rushed to him and leaned her head against his chest. Bracknell felt awkward, with the grim-faced soldiers flanking him. He slid his arms around her waist hesitantly, tentatively, then suddenly clung to her like a drowning man clutching a life preserver.

  "Darling, I'll go out to the Belt with you," Lara said, all in a gush. "Wherever they send you, I'll go there too."

  He pushed her back away from him. "No! You can't throw away your life. They're putting me in some sort of a penal colony; you won't be allowed there."

  "But I-"

  "Go back home. Live your life. Forget about me. I'm a dead man. Dead and gone. Don't throw away your life on a corpse."

  "No, Mance, I won't let you-"

  He shoved her roughly and turned to the soldier on his left. "Let's go. Andale!"

  Lara looked shocked, her eyes wide, her mouth open in protest.

  "Andale!" he repeated to the soldiers, louder, and started walking toward the gate. They rushed to catch up with him. He did not dare look back at Lara as the soldiers marched him into the access tunnel that led to the Clippership's hatch. His last sight of her was the stunned look on her face. He didn't want to see the tears filling her eyes, the hopelessness. He felt wretched enough for both of them.

  The access tunnel was smooth windowless plastic. A birth canal, Bracknell thought. I'm being born into another life. Everything I had, everything and everyone I knew, is behind me now. I'm leaving my life behind me and entering hell.

  And then he saw the bulky form of Rev. Danvers standing at the end of the tunnel, blocking the Clippership hatch. The minister was also in black, he looked downcast, sorrowful, almost guilty.

  Bracknell felt a wave of fury burn through his guts. Damned ignorant viper. Frightened of anything new, anything different. He's happy that the tower failed, but he's trying to put on a sympathetic face.

  Bracknell walked right up to Danvers. "Don't tell me you're going out to the Belt with me."

  Danver's face reddened. "No, I hadn't intended to. But if you feel the need for spiritual consolation, perhaps I-"

  With a bitter laugh, Bracknell said, "Don't worry, I was only joking."

  "I can contact the New Morality office at Ceres on your behalf," Danvers suggested.

  Bracknell wanted to spit out, "Go to hell," but he bit his lip and said nothing.

  "You'll need spiritual comfort out there," Danvers said, his voice low, almost trembling. "You don't have to be alone in your time of tribulation."

  "Is that what you came here to tell me? That I can have some pious psalm singer drone in my ear? Some consolation!"

  "No," Danvers said, his heavy head sinking slightly. "I came to... to tell you how sorry I am that things have worked out the way they have."

  "Sure you are."

  "I am. Truly I am. When I reported to my superiors about your using nanotechnology, I was merely doing my duty. I had no personal animosity toward you. Quite the opposite."

  Despite his anger Bracknell could see the distress in Danvers's flushed face. Some of the fury leached out of him.

  "I had no idea it would lead to this," Danvers was going on, almost blubbering. "You must believe me, I never wanted to cause harm to you or anyone else."

  "Of course not," Bracknell said tightly.

  "I was merely doing my duty."

  "Sure."

  One of the soldiers prodded Bracknell's back.

  "I've got to get aboard," he said to Danvers.

  "I'll pray for you."

  "Yeah. Do that."

  They left Danvers at the hatch and entered the Clippership. Its circular passenger compartment was empty: twenty rows of seats arranged two by two with an aisle down the middle. Instead of flight attendants, two marshals with stun wands strapped to their hips were standing just inside the hatch.

  "Take any seat you like, Mr. Bracknell," said the taller of the two men.

  "This flight is exclusively for you," said the other, with a smirk. "Courtesy of Masterson Aerospace Corporation and the International Court of Justice."

  Bracknell fought down an urge to punch him in his smug face. He looked around the circular compartment, then chose one of the few seats that was next to a window. One of the soldiers sat next to him, the other directly behind him.

  It took nearly half an hour before the Cl
ippership was ready for launch. Bracknell saw there was a video screen on the seat back in front of him. He ignored its bland presentation of a Masterson Aerospace documentary and peered out the little window at the workers moving around the blast-blackened concrete pad on which the rocket vehicle stood. He heard thumps and clangs, the gurgling of what he took to be rocket propellant, then the screen showed a brief video about safety and takeoff procedures.

  Bracknell braced himself for the rocket engines' ignition. They lit off with a demon's roar and he felt an invisible hand pressing him down into the thickly cushioned seat. The ground fell away and he could see the whole airport, then the towers and squares of Quito, and finally the long black snake of the fallen skytower lying across the hilly land like a dead and blasted dream.

  It was only then that he burst into tears.

  IN TRANSIT

  Although Bracknell's Clippership ride from Quito to orbit was exclusively for him, the vehicle they transferred him to held many other convicts.

  It was not a torch ship, the kind of fusion-driven vessel that could accelerate all the way out to the Belt and make it to Ceres in less than a week. Bracknell was put aboard a freighter named Alhambra, an old, slow bucket that spent months coasting from Earth out to the Belt.

  His fellow prisoners were mostly men exiled for one crime or another, heading for a life of mining the asteroids. Bracknell counted three murderers (one of them a sullen, drug-raddled woman), four thieves of various accomplishments, six embezzlers and other white-collar crooks, and an even dozen others who had been convicted of sexual crimes or violations of religious authority.

  The captain of the freighter obviously did not like ferrying convicts to the Belt, but it paid more than going out empty to pick up ores. The prisoners were marched into the unused cargo hold, which had been fitted out with old, rusting cots and a row of portable toilets. It was big, bare metal womb with walls scuffed and scratched by years worth of heavy wear. The narrow, sagging metal-framed cots were bolted to the floor, the row of toilet cubicles lined one wall. As soon as the Alhambra broke orbit and started on its long, coasting journey to the Belt, the captain addressed his "passengers" over the ship's video intercom.

  "I am Captain Farad," he announced. In the lone screen fixed high overhead in the hold, Bracknell and the others could see that the captain's lean, sallow face was set in a sour, stubbly scowl that clearly showed his contempt for his "passengers."

  "I give the orders aboard this vessel and you obey them," he went on. "If you don't give me any trouble I won't give you any trouble. But if you start any trouble, if you're part of any trouble, if you're just only near trouble when it happens, I'll have you jammed into a spacesuit and put outside on the end of a tether and that's the way you'll ride out to Ceres."

  The convicts mumbled and glowered up at the screen. Bracknell thought that the captain meant every word of what he'd said quite literally.

  Even with that warning, the journey was not entirely peaceful. There were no private accommodations for the convicts aboard the freighter; they were simply locked into the empty cargo hold. Within a day, the hold stank of urine and vomit.

  Alhambra's living module rotated slowly at the end of a five-kilometer tether, with its logistics and smelting modules on the other end, so that there was a feeling of nearly Earth-level gravity inside. Meals were served by simple-minded robots that could neither be bribed nor coerced. Bracknell did his best to stay apart from all the others, including the women convicted of prostitution, who went unashamedly from cot to cot once the overhead lights had been turned down for the night.

  Still, it was impossible to live in peace. His mind buzzed constantly with the memory of all he'd lost: Lara, especially. His dreams were filled with visions of the skytower collapsing, of the millions who had been killed, all of them rising from their graves and pointing accusing skeletal fingers at him. Where did it go wrong? Bracknell asked himself, over and over and over again. The questions tortured him. The structure was sound, he knew it was. Yet it had failed. Why? Had some unusually powerful electrical current in the ionosphere snapped the connector links at the geostationary level? Should I have put more insulation up at that level? What did I do wrong? What did I do?

  It was his dreams-nightmares, really-that got him into trouble. More than once he was awakened roughly by one of the other convicts, angry that his moaning was keeping all those around his cot from sleeping.

  "You sound like a fuckin' baby," snarled one of the angry men, "cryin' and yellin'."

  "Yeah," said another. "Shut your mouth or we'll shut it for you."

  For several nights Bracknell tried to force himself to stay awake, but eventually he fell asleep and once he did his haunting dreams returned.

  Suddenly he was being yanked off his cot, punched and kicked by a trio of angry men. Bracknell tried to defend himself, he fought back and unexpectedly found himself enjoying the pain and the blood and the fury as he smashed their snarling faces, grabbed a man by the hair and banged his head off the metal rail of his cot, kneed another in the groin and pounded him in the kidneys. More men swarmed over him and he went down, but he was hitting, kicking, biting, until he blacked out.

  When he awoke he was strapped down in a bunk. Through swollen, blood-encrusted eyes he realized that this must be the ship's infirmary. It smelled like a hospital: disinfectant and crisply clean sheets. No one else was in sight. Medical monitors beeped softly above his head. Every part of his body ached miserably. When he tried to lift his head a shock of pain ran the length of his spine.

  "You've got a couple of broken ribs," said a rough voice from behind him.

  The captain stepped into his view. "You're Bracknell, eh? You put up a good fight, I'll say that much for you." He was a small man, lean and lithe, his skin an ashen light tan, the stubble on his unshaved face mostly gray. A scar marred his upper lip, making him look as if he were perpetually snarling. His hair was pulled back off his face and tied into a little queue.

  Bracknell tried to ask what happened, but his lips were so swollen his words were terribly slurred.

  "I reviewed the fight on the video monitor," the captain said, frowning down at him. "Infrared images. Not as clear as visible light, but good enough for the likes of you scum."

  "I'm not scum," Bracknell said thickly.

  "No? You killed more people than the guys who were pounding you ever did."

  Bracknell turned his head away from the captain's accusing eyes.

  "I was an investor in Skytower Corporation," the captain went on. "I was going to retire and live off my profits. Now I'm broke. A lifetime's savings wiped out because you screwed up the engineering. What'd you do, shave a few megabucks on the structure so you could skim the money for yourself?"

  It was all Bracknell could do to murmur, "No."

  "Not much, I'll bet." The captain stared down at Bracknell, unconcealed loathing in his eyes. "The guys who jumped you are riding outside, just as I promised troublemakers would. You'd be out there, too, except I don't have enough suits."

  Bracknell said nothing.

  "You'll spend the rest of the flight here, in the infirmary," said the captain. "Think of it as solitary confinement."

  "Thanks," Bracknell muttered.

  "I'm not doing this for you," the captain snapped. "Long as you're in the hold with the rest of those savages you're going to be a lightning rod. It'll be a quieter ride with you in here."

  "You could have let them kill me."

  "Yeah, I could have. But I get paid for every live body I deliver at Ceres. Corpses don't make money for me."

  With that, the captain left. Bracknell lay alone, strapped into the bunk. When his nightmares came there was no one to be bothered by his screams.

  CERES

  As the weeks dragged by, Bracknell's ribs and other injuries slowly healed. The ship's physician-an exotic-looking, dark-skinned young Hindu woman-allowed him to get up from the bunk and walk stiffly around the narrow confines of the infirmary
. She brought him his meals, staring at him through lowered lashes with her big liquid eyes.

  Once, when he woke up screaming in the middle of the night, the physician and the captain both burst into the tiny infirmary and sedated him with a hypospray. He slept dreamlessly for a day and a half.

  After weeks of being tended by this silent physician with her almond eyes and subtle perfume, Bracknell realized, My god, even in a wrinkled, faded set of sloppy coveralls she looks sexy. He thought of Lara and wondered what she was doing now, how she was putting together the shattered pieces of her life. The physician never spoke a word to him and Bracknell said nothing to her beyond a half-whispered "Thank you" when she'd bring in a tray of food. The young woman was obviously wary of him, almost frightened. If I touch her and she screams I'll end up outside in a spacesuit, trying to stay alive on liquids and canned air, he told himself.