“Japanese?”
“Japanese descent, third generation American. Raised in Selene, where he graduated with honors in molecular engineering.”
Bracknell gaped at her. “Nanotechnology?”
“I believe so.”
Bracknell stared down at the unconscious convict. He did not look Asian, there were no epicanthic folds in his closed eyes. Yet there was an odd, unsettling quality about his face. The skin was stretched tight over prominent cheekbones and a square jaw that somehow looked subtly wrong for the rest of his face, as if someone had roughed it out and pasted it onto him. The color of his skin was strange, too, a mottled gray. Bracknell had never seen a skin tone like it.
He looked back at Addie. “Can you wake him up?”
THE PRISONER’S TALE
“They’ll kill me sooner or later,” said Toshikazu Koga, his voice little more than a painfully labored whisper. “There’s no place left that I can run to.”
Bracknell was bending over his infirmary bed to hear him better. Addie sat on the other, unused bed.
“Who wants to kill you?” she asked. “Why?”
“The skytower—”
“What do you know about the skytower?” Bracknell demanded. “I was a loyal follower, a Believer…”
“What about the skytower?”
“I didn’t know. I should have guessed.” Toshikazu coughed. “Truth is, I didn’t want to know.”
It took all of Bracknell’s self-control to keep from grabbing the man by the shoulders and shaking his story out of him.
“What was it that you didn’t want to know?” Addie asked gently.
“All that money. They wouldn’t pay all that money for something legitimate. I should have refused. I should have…” His voice faded away.
“Damn!” Bracknell snapped. “He’s passed out again.”
Addie’s eyes flicked to the monitors on the wall. “We must let him rest.”
“But he knows something about the skytower! Something to do with nanotechnology and the tower.”
Getting up from the bed and looking him squarely in the eyes, Addie said, “We’ll learn nothing from him if he dies. Let him rest. Let me try to save his life.”
Knowing she was right despite his desperate desire to wring the truth out of the unconscious patient, Bracknell nodded tightly. “Let me know when he comes to.”
He got as far as the doorway to the anteroom, then turned. “And don’t let anyone else near him. No one!”
She looked alarmed at the vehemence of his command.
Little by little, in bits and pieces over the next two days, they wormed Toshikazu’s story out of him while Addie repeatedly called to Selene to beg for a medevac mission before Alhambra coasted too far from the Moon.
“The best I can do is stabilize him. He’ll die unless he gets proper medical help.”
Bracknell hoped he’d stay alive long enough to reveal what he knew about the skytower.
Toshikazu Koga had been an engineer in Selene’s nanotechnology laboratory, working mainly on nanomachines designed to separate pure metals out of the ores in asteroids. Instead of the rock rats digging out the ores and smelting them the old-fashioned way, nanomachines could pull out individual atoms of a selected metal while the human miners waited and watched from the comforts of their spacecraft.
Toshikazu was also a Believer, a devout, churchgoing member of the New Morality. Although his fellow churchgoers disapproved of nanotechnology, he saw nothing wrong with its practice on the Moon or elsewhere in space.
“It’s not like we’re on Earth, with ten billion people jammed in cheek by jowl,” he would tell those who scowled at his profession. “Here on the Moon nanomachines produce the air we breathe and the water we drink. They separate helium three from the regolith sands to power the fusion generators. And now I’m helping the miners in the Asteroid Belt, making their lives safer and more profitable.”
But there was another side to his nanotech work. His brother Takeo ran a lucrative clinic at the Hell Crater complex, where he used Toshikazu’s knowledge of nanotechnology for medical purposes. Because of his religious beliefs, Toshikazu felt uneasy about his brother’s using nanomachines to help rejuvenate aging men and women. Or for the trivial purposes of cosmetic surgery.
“Why use a scalpel or liposuction,” his brother would ask him, “when you can produce nanobugs that will tighten a sagging jawline or trim a bulging belly?”
Toshikazu knew that his brother was doing more than lifting breasts and buttocks. Men would come to him furtively, asking to have their faces completely changed. Takeo accepted their money and never asked why they wanted to alter their appearance. Toshikazu knew they were criminals trying to escape the law.
He was surprised, then, when a pair of churchmen visited him in his laboratory in Selene.
“At first I thought they wanted me to give them evidence against my brother,” he whispered painfully to Bracknell from his infirmary bed. “But no … it was worse than that…”
One of the churchmen was a high official of the New Morality. The other was a Chinese member of the Flower Dragon movement. What they wanted was a set of nanomachines that could destroy buckyball fibers.
Bracknell clutched at the injured man’s arm when he heard that, making him yowl so loud that Addie rushed in to see what had happened.
“You’ll kill him!” she screamed at Bracknell.
“I… I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
Toshikazu lay on the bed, his eyes glazed with pain. Addie demanded that Bracknell leave the infirmary.
“I’ll tell you when you can come back,” she said.
For a moment he thought he’d push her out of his way and get the rest of the story from the injured man. Then he took a deep breath and wordlessly left the infirmary.
All that night his mind seethed with what Toshikazu was telling him. He checked in at the infirmary on his way to the bridge the next morning, but Addie would not let him past the anteroom. “Let him rest,” she said. “He’ll be no use to you dead.”
Bracknell could hardly keep his attention on his duties. The captain snarled at him several times for his mental lapses. Then a message came in from another vessel, a Yamagata torch ship named Hiryu. Bracknell saw on the comm console’s main screen an aged Japanese man with long snow-white hair flowing past his shoulders.
“We have heard your call for a medical evacuation,” said the white-haired man. “We can reach you in six hours and evacuate your injured prisoner.”
Bracknell was tempted to tell the man not to bother; he didn’t want Toshikazu removed from Alhambra until he’d gotten his full story out of him. But, feeling the captain’s eyes on his back, he dutifully switched the call to the captain’s screen. In two minutes they had agreed for Hiryu to pick up the convict and ferry him back to Selene’s medical center.
“Hiryu,” the captain muttered after the call was terminated. “That means ‘flying dragon’ in Japanese, I think.”
As soon as his shift was finished, Bracknell hurried down the passageway to the infirmary. Addie wasn’t in the anteroom; he saw her bending over Toshikazu’s bed. He could see from the tortured look on her face that something was very wrong.
“He’s dying,” she said.
“A ship is on its way to pick him up,” Bracknell said, torn between his need to hear Toshikazu’s full story and a humanitarian instinct to get proper medical care for the man. “It’ll be here in less than four hours.”