No, Bracknell concluded. Victor simply took advantage of his opportunity. Took advantage of me. And Danvers helped him.
Still, his rage boiled inside him, made him morose and curt with everyone around him, even Addie. The captain watched his new attitude and said nothing, except once, when Bracknell was assigned to escorting a new group of convicts into their makeshift quarters down in the hold. One of the prisoners started a scuffle with another one. Bracknell dove into them swinging his stun wand like a club and beat them both unconscious.
“You’re starting to come back to life,” the captain said after a pair of husky crewmen had pulled him off the bleeding prisoners. He made a strange, twisted smile. “You’re starting to feel pain again.”
“I’ve felt pain before,” Bracknell muttered as they trudged up the passageway toward the bridge.
“Maybe,” said the captain. “But now you can feel the demon gnawing at your guts. Now you know how I felt when they killed my wife. How I still feel.”
Bracknell stared at him with new understanding.
Back and forth through the Belt sailed Alhambra, and then set out on the long, tedious journey to Earth to deliver refined metals and pick up convicts. It seemed to Bracknell, when he thought about it, that there were always more convicts waiting to be sent out to the Belt, always more men and women who’d run afoul of the law. Teenagers, too. The governments of Earth had found a convenient way to get rid of troublemakers: dump them out in the Asteroid Belt. They must be making the laws tighter all the time, more restrictive, he thought. Or maybe they’re just using banishment to the Belt instead of other punishments.
On one of Alhambra’s stops at Earth, still another set of convicts was herded into the empty cargo hold—sixteen men and eleven women, most of them looking too frightened to cause any trouble. Only two of the bunch had been guilty of violent crimes: a strong-arm mugger and a murderer who had stabbed her boyfriend to death.
Bracknell was surprised, then, when the alarm hooted shortly after they had locked the prisoners in the hold. From his duty station on the bridge he looked over at the intercom screen. Two men were beating up a third, a tall, skinny scarecrow of a man. He saw their hapless victim trying to defend himself by wrapping his long arms around his head, but his two attackers knocked him to the metal deck with a rain of vicious body blows, then began kicking him.
“Get down there!” the captain snapped to Bracknell as he tapped on the controls set into the armrest of his command chair. Bracknell jumped up from his own seat, ducked through the hatch and sprinted toward the hold. He knew that the captain was dropping the air pressure in there hard enough to pop eardrums. They’ll all be unconscious by the time I get to the hold, he thought.
He could hear the footfalls of two other crewmen following him down the passageway. Stopping at the hatch only long enough to slip on the oxygen masks hanging on the wall, the three of them opened the hatch and pulled out three of the unconscious bodies: the bloodied scarecrow and his two attackers. Leaving the other crewmen to deal with the attackers, Bracknell picked up the victim and started running toward the infirmary. The man was as light as a bird, nothing but skin and bones.
Addie was waiting at the infirmary. She allowed Bracknell to lay the unconscious man on one of the two beds there as she powered up the diagnostic sensors built into the bulkhead.
“You should get back to the bridge,” she said to Bracknell as she began strapping the man down.
“As soon as he’s secure,” Bracknell said, fastening a strap across the man’s frail chest. “He’s a prisoner, after all.”
The man moaned wretchedly but did not open his eyes. Bracknell saw that they were both swollen shut, and his nose appeared to be broken. Blood covered most of his face and was spattered over his gray prison-issue coveralls.
“Go!” Addie said in an urgent whisper. “I can take care of him now.”
Bracknell headed back to the bridge. By the time he slid back into the chair before his console, he could see that the other convicts were stirring in the hold, regaining consciousness as the air pressure returned to normal. The two attackers were already sealed into hardshell space-suits and being dragged to an airlock.
“What started the fight?” he wondered aloud.
“What difference does it make?” the captain retorted. “It wasn’t much of a fight, anyway. Looked to me like those two gorillas wanted to beat the scarecrow to death. He probably tried to proposition them.”
Half an hour later Bracknell punched up the outside camera view. One of the spacesuited figures was floating inertly at the end of a buckyball tether. The other had crawled along the length of his tether and was pounding at the airlock hatch with a gloved fist.
“Too bad there’s no radio in his suit,” the captain remarked sourly. “I imagine we’d pick up some choice vocabulary.”
Once his shift was finished, Bracknell headed for his quarters. As he passed the open door of the infirmary, though, Addie called to him.
He stopped at the doorway and saw that she was at the minuscule desk in the infirmary’s anteroom, the glow from the desktop screen casting an eerie greenish light on her face.
“You were the chief of the skytower project, weren’t you,” Addie said. It was not a question.
His insides twitched, but Bracknell answered evenly, “Yes. And this is where it got me.”
“Permanently exiled from Earth.”
He nodded wordlessly.
Glancing over her shoulder at the open doorway to the infirmary’s beds, Addie said, “The man you brought in, he keeps mumbling something about the skytower.”
“Lots of people remember the skytower,” Bracknell said bitterly. “It was the biggest disaster in history.”
She shook her head. “But this man is not who he claims to be in his prison file.”
“What do you mean?”
“The patient in the infirmary,” she said, “keeps babbling about the skytower. He says they want to kill him because he knows about the skytower.”
“Knows what?”
Addie’s almond eyes were steady, somber. “I don’t know. But I thought that you would want to speak with him.”
“You’re damned right I do.”
She got up from the desk and Bracknell followed her into the infirmary. Her patient was asleep or unconscious as they squeezed into the cramped compartment. The other bed was unoccupied. Medical monitors beeped softly. The place had that sterile smell of antiseptics overlaying the metallic tang of blood.
Bracknell saw a tall, very slim, long-limbed man stretched out on the narrow infirmary bed. He was still in the clothes he’d been wearing when he’d been hurt: a pair of gray coveralls, wrinkled and dark with perspiration, spattered with his own blood. His face was battered, swollen, a bandage sprayed over one lacerated brow, another along the length of his broken nose. His body was immobilized by the restraining straps, and a slim plastic intravenous tube was inserted in his left forearm.
Addie called up the diagnostic computer and scans of the man’s body sprang up on the wall beside his bed.
“He has severe internal injuries,” she said, in a whisper. “They did a thorough job of beating him. A few more minutes and he would have died.”
“Will he make it?”
“The computer’s prognosis is not favorable. I have called back to Selene to ask for a medevac flight, but I doubt that they will go to the trouble for a prisoner.”
Bracknell asked, “What’s his name?”
“That’s just it,” she said, with a tiny frown that creased the bridge of her nose. “I’m not certain. His prison file shows him as Jorge Quintana, but when I ran a scan of his DNA profile the Earthside records came up with the name Toshikazu Koga.”