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 Clippership 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.”