GOETHE BASE
It’s all gone wrong, Alexios said to himself as he sat miserably alone in his sparely furnished office at the construction base. Horribly wrong.
Lara, Victor, and Danvers had left for Earth on the ship that had shepherded the six new power satellites from Selene. She must be telling Victor everything, Alexios thought. It’s only a matter of time before the IAA or some other group sends investigators here to check me out. If they suspect I’m not who I say I am, they’ll want to do DNA scans on me. If I refuse they’ll get a court order.
It’s finished, he told himself. Over. She’s not the same Lara I knew. The years have changed her.
He stood up and studied his reflection in the blank wall screen. They’ve changed me, too, he realized. He paced across the little office, thinking that he was still all alone in the universe. Lara doesn’t love me anymore. No one in the entire solar system cares about me. There’s only one thing left to do. Get Yamagata down here and finish the job. Make him pay before they come after me. After that, it doesn’t matter what happens.
Yet he hesitated. When the investigators come I could tell them the whole story, tell them how Yamagata sabotaged the skytower, how he’s the one who’s really responsible for all those deaths.
But the mocking voice in his head sneered, And they’ll believe you? Against Yamagata? Where’s your evidence? He’s murdered everyone connected with the sabotage. Toshikazu was the last one, and his assassins even killed themselves so there’d be no possible witnesses remaining.
Alexios knew the severed end of the skytower lay more than four thousand meters beneath the surface of the Atlantic, near the fracture zone where hot magma wells up from deep beneath the Earth’s crust. No one would send an expedition to search for the remains of nanomachines that had probably been dissolved by now, he knew.
He also knew that Saito Yamagata maintained the convenient fiction that his son ran Yamagata Corporation. He was in a lamasery in Tibet when the skytower went down, Alexios remembered. Yes, of course, the voice in his mind taunted. He pulled all the strings for this vast murderous conspiracy from his retreat in the Himalayas. Try getting the authorities to buy that.
Alexios shook his head slowly. No, I’m not going to try to get the authorities to do anything. I’m going to take care of Yamagata myself. I’m going to end this thing once and for all.
He told the phone to call Saito Yamagata.
Yamagata was clearly uncomfortable about being out on the surface; Alexios could see the unhappy frown on his face through the visor of his helmet. Don’t worry, he said silently, you won’t be out here long. Only for the rest of your life.
The two men were riding a slow, bumping tractor across the bleak surface of Mercury, dipping down into shallow craters and then laboring up the other side, moving farther and farther from the base. It was night; the Sun would not rise for another hour, but the glow of starlight and the pale glitter of the zodiacal light bathed the bleak landscape in a cold, silvery radiance.
Despite all the months he’d been on Mercury, Alexios still could not get accustomed to the little planet’s short horizon. It was like the brink of a cliff looming too close; the edge of the world. In the airless vacuum the horizon was sharp and clear, no blurring or softening with distance, a knife edge: the solid world ended and the black infinity of space lay beyond.
“You’ll be out of camera range in two more minutes,” the base controller’s calm flat voice said in Alexios’s helmet earphones.
“You have a satellite track on us, don’t you?” he asked.
“Affirmative. Two of ’em, as a matter of fact.”
“Our beacon’s coming through all right?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Good enough.”
Even though the tractor’s glassteel cabin was pressurized, both Yamagata and Alexios were wearing full spacesuits, their helmet visors closed and sealed. Safety regulations, Alexios had told Yamagata when the older man had grumbled about getting into the uncomfortable suit.
“How far are we going to go?” Yamagata asked as the tractor slewed around a house-sized boulder.
Taking one gloved hand off the steering controls to point out toward the horizon, Alexios said, “We’ve got to get to the other side of that fault line. Then we’ll double back.”
Yamagata grunted, and the frown on his face relaxed, but only slightly.
It had been easy enough to get him down to the planet’s surface.
“I’d like to show you the site we’re considering for the mass driver,” Alexios had told Yamagata. “Naturally, we can’t make the final decision. That’s up to you.”
Yamagata’s image in Alexios’s wall screen had turned thoughtful. “Is it necessary for me to inspect this location personally?”
Choosing his words carefully, Alexios had replied, “I understand, sir, that it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable to come down here to the surface. Even a little dangerous, to be truthful.”
Yamagata had stiffened at that. Drawing himself up to his full height, he’d told Alexios, “I will come to the base tomorrow. My transportation coordinator will inform you of when you may expect me.”
Alexios had smiled. Touch the man on his Japanese brand of machismo and you’ve got him. The old samurai tradition. He doesn’t want to lose face in front of his employees.
“I received a report from my son’s technical experts in Japan,” Yamagata said, staring straight ahead as he sat alongside Alexios in the lumbering tractor. “They believe your numbers on the solar cell degradation problem are exaggerated.”
Alexios knew perfectly well that they were. “Exaggerated?” he asked.
“Overstated,” said Yamagata, his voice muffled slightly by the spacesuit helmet.
It was impossible to shrug inside the heavy suit. Alexios said smoothly, “I admit that I showed you the worst-case numbers. I thought it best that way.”
Yamagata grunted. “We may not have to harden the power satellites after all.”
“That’s good news, then,” Alexios replied. It didn’t matter now, he thought. None of it mattered any more.
Yamagata was silent for several kilometers. Then, “What makes you think this is the best site for the catapult launcher?” he demanded. “If it takes this long to get there, why is this site so preferable?”
Alexios smiled behind his visor. “It’s that blasted fault line. If you approve the site, we’ll bridge over it. But right now we have to go all the way around it. Won’t be long now, though.”
Yamagata nodded and seemed to settle down inside his suit.
It won’t be long now, Alexios repeated silently.
FREIGHTER XENOBIA
Lara Tierney Molina could not sleep. Victor lay beside her, dead to the world on the sedatives and tranquilizers he’d been taking ever since boarding the creaking old freighter, coasting now on a four-month trajectory back to Selene.
The clock’s digits glowing in the darkness read 12:53. She slipped out of bed, groped in the shadows of the darkened stateroom for the first dress she could find in her travel bag, and pulled it on. Victor would sleep for hours more, she knew. She tiptoed to the door, opened it as softly as she could, and stepped out into the passageway. As she slid the door closed and heard the faint click of its lock, she wondered which way led to the galley.