“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 said.