“He’s dead,” Lara said. Bracknell could barely hear her over the buzzing in his head.
Feeling stunned, thick-witted, Bracknell gazed around the windowless men’s room. One of the tiled walls had cracked. Or had it been that way when they had rushed in here?
“Dead?” he echoed numbly.
“A heart attack, maybe,” Lara said. She clung close to Bracknell. He could feel her trembling.
“He’s lucky,” said Bracknell.
THE RUINS
It took three days before they arrested Bracknell. He had made his way back to the shattered ruins of the Sky City, fighting through the panicked crowd at the airport, holding Lara close to him. The vast parking lot outside the airport seemed undamaged, except for the gritty dust that covered everything and crunched under their feet as they walked, tottering, for what seemed like hours until they found the minivan sitting there where they’d left it. Other people were milling around the parking lot, looking dazed, shocked.
A pall of smoke was rising from the city. Soon enough the looting would begin, Bracknell realized. For the moment they’re too stunned to do much of anything, but that’ll pass and they’ll start looting and stealing. And raping.
The minivan looked as if it had gone a thousand klicks without being washed. Bracknell helped Lara into the right-hand seat, then went around and got in himself. The car started smoothly enough. He used the windshield wipers to clear away enough of the dust so he could see to drive, then started slowly out toward the road that led back up into the hills. A few people waved pathetically to him, seeking a ride. To where? Bracknell asked himself silently as he drove past them, accelerating now. A couple of young men trotted toward the minivan and he pushed the accelerator harder. The toll gate at the exit was unoccupied, its arm raised, so he drove right through. In the rear mirror he saw a uniformed guard or policeman or something waving angrily at him. He drove on.
When they finally reached Ciudad de Cielo, they saw that most of it was flattened. Buildings were crushed beneath the skytower’s fallen bulk or blown flat by the shock wave of its collapse. Trucks overturned, lampposts bent and twisted. Dust hung in the air and the stench of death was everywhere, inescapable.
For three days Bracknell and Lara did nothing but dig bodies out of the collapsed buildings of the base city. The tower lay across the ruins like an immense black worm, dead and still, strangely warm to the touch. It had ripped out of all but one of its base tethers. In a distant corner of his mind Bracknell thought that they had designed the tethers pretty well to stand up even partially to the stress.
He worked blindly, numbly, side by side with the few surviving technicians, clerks, maintenance people, cooks, and others who had once been a proud team of builders. Lara worked alongside him, never complaining, like Bracknell and all the others too tired and shocked and disheartened to do much of anything except scrabble in the debris, eat whatever meager rations they could find, and sleep when they were too tired to stand any longer. Grimy, her face smeared with soot, her fingers bloody from digging, her clothes sodden with perspiration, Lara still worked doggedly at rescuing the few who were still alive and dragging out the mangled bodies of the dead.
The third night they saw torches lining the road from Quito, heading toward them.
“Volunteers?” Lara asked, her voice ragged with exhaustion.
“More likely a lynch mob,” said Bracknell, getting up from the rubble he’d been digging in.
“Can you blame them?” said Danvers who was working beside them. “They’re coming to kill everyone here.”
“No,” Bracknell replied, standing up straighter. “It’s me they want. I’m the one responsible for this.”
Lara, her weariness suddenly forgotten, turned her smudged face to Danvers. “You’re a man of god! Do something! Talk to them! Stop them!”
Danvers looked terrified. “Me?”
“There’s no one else,” Lara insisted.
“I’ll go,” Bracknell said grimly. “I’m the one they want.”
“I’ll… I’ll go with you,” Danvers stammered.
“You stay here,” Bracknell said to Lara.
“The hell I will!”
“This is going to be ugly.”
“I’m going where you go, Mance.”
The three of them walked—tottered, really—down the rubble-strewn street to the main road, where the torch-waving mob was marching toward them. Farther down the road, Bracknell could see the headlights of approaching trucks.
The crowd was mainly young men, all of them looking tired and grimy, clothes torn, faces blackened with soot and dirt. They carried shovels, picks, planks of wood. Christ, they look like us, Bracknell said to himself. They’ve been digging for survivors, too.
Danvers fished a small silver crucifix out of his pocket and held it up. In the flickering torchlight it gleamed fitfully. The mob stopped uncertainly.
“My sons,” he began.
One of the men, taller than the others, his eyes glittering with anger and hatred, spat out a string of rapid Spanish. Bracknell caught his drift: We want the men who killed our families. We want justice.
Danvers raised his voice, “Do any of you speak English?”
“We want justice!” a voice yelled from the crowd.
“Justice is the Lord’s,” Danvers bellowed. “God will avenge.”
The crowd surged forward dangerously. Danvers backed up several steps. Bracknell saw that it was going to be no use. The trucks were inching through the rear of the mob now. Bringing reinforcements, he thought. He stepped forward. “I’m the one you want,” he said in Spanish. “I’m the man responsible.”
An older man scurried up to Bracknell and peered at him. Turning back to the others, he shouted, “This is he! This is the chief of the skytower!”
The mob flowed forward, surrounding Bracknell. Lara screamed as Danvers dragged her back into the shadows, toward safety. The leader of the mob spat in Bracknell’s face and raised his shovel high in the air.
A shot cracked through the night. Everyone froze into immobility. Bracknell could feel his heart pounding against his ribs. Then he saw soldiers pouring out of the trucks, each of them armed with assault rifles. An officer waved a pistol angrily and told the men of the mob to back away.
“This man is under arrest,” the officer announced loudly. “He is going to jail.”
Bracknell’s knees nearly gave way. Jail seemed much better than having his brains splattered with a shovel.
THE TRIAL
As the crisply uniformed soldiers with their polished helmets and loaded guns bundled Bracknell into one of the trucks, he thought, Of course. They need to blame someone for this catastrophe. Who else? I’m the one in charge. I’m the one at fault.
He was treated with careful respect, as if he were a vial of nitroglycerine that might explode if mishandled. They placed him in the prison hospital, where a team of physicians and psychologists diagnosed Bracknell as suffering from physical exhaustion and severe emotional depression. He was dosed with psychotropic drugs for five of the six months between his arrest and his trial. During those five months, he was allowed no visitors, no television, nor any contact with the outside world, although police investigators questioned him for hours each day.
Skytower Corporation declared bankruptcy. Its board of directors issued a statement blaming the tower’s collapse on the technical director who headed the construction project in Ecuador, the American engineer Mance Bracknell. Several of the board members fled to the lunar city of Selene, where Earthly legal jurisdiction could not reach them.