“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 hospitaclass="underline" 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.
At last one day, when he was walking normally again, he blurted, “May I ask you something?”
She looked startled for a moment, then nodded wordlessly.
“Why put the troublemakers outside?” Bracknell asked. “Wouldn’t it be easier to dope them with psychotropics?”
The young woman hesitated a heartbeat, then said, “Such drugs are very expensive.”
“But I should think the government would provide them for security purposes, to keep the prisoners quiet.”
A longer hesitation this time, then, “Yes, they do. My father sells the drugs at Ceres. They fetch a good price there.”
“Your father?”
“The captain. He is my father.”
Holy lord! Bracknell thought. Good thing I haven’t touched her. I’d arrive in Ceres in a body bag.
The next morning the captain himself carried in his food tray and stayed to talk.