Mercury Read online

  The job was taking much longer than he’d expected. Fifty cables, that’s all we have to break, Zach grumbled silently, and these chimps are taking all fucking day to do it.

  The underside of the geostationary platform looked like an immense spiderweb to Zach as he peered at it through the cameras of his EVA team. It matched the specs in his files almost exactly; there were always slight deviations between the blueprints and the actual construction. Nobody can build anything this big without straying from the plans here and there, at least a little bit.

  Zach knew that the tower’s main support came from these cables, stretched taught by centrifugal force as the whole gigantic assembly swung through space in synchrony with the Earth’s daily spin. Break that connection here at the geostationary level and the stretching force disappears. The tower will collapse to the ground while the equally-long upper section goes spinning out into space.

  Fifty cables, he repeated to himself. Let those nanobugs eat through fifty cables and the others won’t have the strength to hold the rig together. Fifty cables.

  Emerson’s ear plug chimed softly with the tone he knew came from the safety officer.

  “Go ahead,” he said into his lip mike.

  “Got something strange goin’ on here.”

  “What?”

  “That Clipper you’ve got docked. It’s venting gases.”

  “Venting?”

  “Hydrogen and oxygen, from what the laser spectrometer tells me.”

  Emerson thought a moment. “Bleeding a nearly-empty tank, maybe?”

  The safety officer’s voice sounded troubled. “This isn’t a bleed. They’re pumpin’ out a lot of gas. Like the propellant they’d be using for their return trip.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Emerson quoted.

  Zach licked his lips. The fifty cables were now being eaten away by the gobblers. He had calculated that blowing thirty of the cables would be enough to do the job, but he’d gone for fifty as an extra precaution. Okay, we’ve got fifty and we’re all set.

  He looked up at the two Asian pilots, still wearing those cool dark shades. “The nanomachines are in place.”

  “Good.”

  “All the EVA guys are back inside?”

  “That is not your responsibility.”

  Zach felt the pilot was being snotty. “Okay,” he said, “if any of them get eaten by the bugs, you write the condolence letters.”

  “Start the nanomachines working,” the pilot said, without turning to look at Zach.

  “They are working.”

  “Very well.”

  “Shouldn’t we disconnect from the dock now?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  The Collapse

  Zach thought it was a little weird to stay connected to the tower’s geostationary docking tunnel while the nanomachines were chewing away at the cables, but he figured the pilot knew what he was doing. The bugs won’t get the chance to damage the Clippership; we’ll disconnect before we’re in any danger, he was pretty certain.

  Besides, these two black-goggled pilots aren’t going to kill themselves, Zach further assured himself. Not knowingly.

  Outside the ship there was no sound. No vibration. Nothing.

  For the first time, the pilot turned in his seat and lifted his glasses to glare directly at Zach. “Well? Have you done it?”

  “Yeah,” Zach replied, feeling nettled. “It’s done. Now get us the hell out of here before the upper half of the tower starts spinning off to Alpha Centauri.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said the pilot.

  In the geostationary operations center, Emerson felt a slight tremor, a barely sensed vibration, as if a subway train had passed below the floor he stood on.

  “What was that?” he wondered aloud.

  His assistant’s voice responded, “Yeah, I felt it too.”

  Tremors and vibrations were not good. In all the hours he’d spent in the tower at its various levels, it had always been as solid and unmoving as a mountain. What the hell could cause it to shake?

  “Whatever it was,” his assistant said, “it stopped.”

  But Emerson was busy flicking his fingers along his keyboard, checking the safety program. No leaks, no loss of air pressure. Electrical systems in the green. Power systems functioning normally. Structural integrity—

  His eyes goggled at the screen. Red lights cluttered the screen. Forty, no fifty of the one hundred and twenty main cables had been severed. For long moments he could not speak, could hardly breathe. His brain refused to function. Fifty cables. We’re going to die.

  As he stared at the screen’s display, another cable tore loose. And another. He could fell the deck beneath his feet shuddering.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” one of the technicians yelled from across the chamber.

  “Let’s to it, pell mell,” Emerson whispered, more to himself than anyone who might hear him. “If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.”

  Bracknell was standing by the ceiling-high window at the Quito airport terminal gate, waiting for the Clippership for Paris to begin boarding. It sat out on its blast-scarred concrete pad, a squat cone constructed of diamond panels, manufactured by lunar nanomachines at Selene. They can use nanomachines up there but we can’t here, Bracknell thought. Well, we’ve gotten around that stupid law. Once we get the patent—

  A flash of light caught his eye. It was bright, brilliant even, but so quick that he wasn’t certain if he’d actually seen anything real. Like a bolt of lightning. It seemed to come from the skytower, standing straight and slim, rising from the mountains and through the white clouds that swept over their peaks.

  Lara came up beside him, complaining, “They can fly from Quito to Paris in less than an hour, but it takes longer than that to board the Clipper.”

  Bracknell smiled at her. “Patience is a virtue, as Rev. Danvers would say.”

  “I don’t care. I’m getting—” Her words broke off. She was staring at the skytower. “Mance … look!”

  He saw it, too. The tower was no longer a straight line bisecting the sky. It seemed to be rippling, like a rope that is flicked back and forth at one end.

  His mind racing, Bracknell stared at the tower. It can’t fall! It can’t! But if it does…

  He grabbed Lara around the shoulders and began running, dragging her, away from the big windows. “Get away from the windows!” he bellowed. “Quitarse las ventanas! Run! Vamos!”

  “Nothing is happening,” said the pilot accusingly.

  “Yes it is,” Zach answered. He was getting tired of the Asian’s stupidity. These guys are supposed to be patient; didn’t anybody ever give them Zen lessons? “Give it a few minutes. Those cables are popping, one by one. The more that snap, the faster the rest of ’em go.”

  “I see nothing,” insisted the pilot, pointing toward the cockpit window.

  Maybe if you took off those flicking glasses you could see better, creep, Zach grumbled silently. Aloud, he snapped, “You’re gonna see plenty in two-three minutes. Now get us the flick outta here or else we’re gonna go flipping out into deep space!”

  “So you say.”

  A blinding flash of light seared Zach’s eyes. He heard both pilots shriek. What the fuck was that? Zach wondered, pawing at his eyes. Through burning tears he saw the Clippership’s cockpit, blurred, darkened, everything tinged in red. Rubbing his eyes again Zach squinted down at his laptop. The screen was dark, dead.

  Then he realized that both pilots were jabbering in their Asian language.

  “What happened?” he screeched.

  “Electrical discharge.” The pilot’s voice sounded edgy for the first time. “An enormous electrical discharge.”

  “Even though we expected it,” said the copilot, “it was a helluva jolt.”

  “Are we okay?” Zach demanded.

  “Checking…”

  “Get us out of here!” Zach screamed.

  “All systems are down,” the copilot said. “Comp
lete power failure.”

  “Do something!”

  “There is nothing to be done.”

  “But we’ll die!”

  “Of course.”

  Zach began blubbering, babbling incoherently at these two lunatics.

  Removing his glasses and rubbing at his burning eyes, the pilot turned to his copilot and said in Japanese, “The American genius doesn’t want to be a martyr.”

  The copilot’s lean face was sheened with perspiration. “No one told him he would be.”

  “Will that affect his next life, I wonder? Will he be reborn as another human being or something less? A cockroach, perhaps.”

  “He doesn’t believe in reincarnation. He doesn’t believe in anything except destruction and his own ego.”

  The pilot said, “In that case, he has succeeded admirably. He has destroyed his own ego.”

  Neither man laughed. They sat strapped into their seats awaiting their fate with tense resignation while Zach screamed at them to no avail.

  The massive electrical discharge released when some of the skytower’s insulating panels were eaten away completed the destruction of the connectors that held the tower’s two segments together at the geostationary level.

  Although buckyball fibers are lighter in weight than any material that is even half their tensile strength, a structure of more than thirty-five thousand kilometers’ length weighs millions of metric tons.

  The skytower wavered as it tore loose from the geostationary platform, disconnected from the centrifugal force that had pulled it taut. One end suddenly free of its mooring, its other end still tethered to the ground, the lower half of the tower staggered like a prizefighter suddenly struck by a knockout blow, then began its long, slow-motion catastrophic collapse.

  The upper end of the tower, equally as long as the lower, was also suddenly released from the force that held it taut. It reacted to the inertia that made it spin around the Earth each twenty-four hours. It continued to spin, but now free of its anchor it swung slowly, inexorably, unstoppably, away from Earth and into the black silent depths of space.

  In the geostationary ops center Emerson saw every damned screen suddenly go dark; his control panel went dead. He felt himself sliding out of his foot restraints and sailing in slow motion across the operations center while the technicians who had been working on installing the new equipment were yanked to the ends of their tethers, hanging in midair, more shocked and surprised than frightened.

  “What the shit is going on, Waldo?” one of them hollered.

  He banged his shoulder painfully against the wall and slid to the floor. Soon enough, he knew, the immense structure would swing around and we’ll all be slung in the opposite direction.

  “Waldo, what the fuck’s happening?” He heard panic creeping into their voices now.

  We’re dead, he knew. There’s not a thing that anybody can do. Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

  “Waldo! What’s goin’ on?”

  They were screaming now, horror-struck, aware now that something had gone terribly wrong. Emerson tried to blank out their yammering, demanding, terrified screams.

  “Fear death?” he quoted Browning:

  “To feel the fog in my throat,

  The mist in my face,

  When the snows begin, and the blasts denote

  I am nearing the place…

  The post of the foe;

  Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,

  Yet the strong man must go…”

  And the upper half of the skytower spun out and away from the Earth forever.

  The lower half of the skytower slowly, slowly tumbled like a majestic tree suddenly turned to putty. Its base, attached to the rotating Earth, was moving more than a thousand kilometers per hour from west to east. Its enormous length, unsupported now, collapsed westward in a long, long, long plunge to Earth.

  The operations crew on duty at Sky City saw their screens glare with baleful red lights. Some of them rushed out into the open, unwilling to believe what their sensors were telling them unless they saw it with their own fear-widened eyes. The skytower was collapsing. They could see it! It was wavering and toppling over like a reed blown by the wind.

  People on the streets in Quito looked up and screamed. Villagers in the mountains stared and crossed themselves.

  At the Quito airport, Mance Bracknell dragged Lara by the arm as he ran down the terminal’s central corridor, screaming, “Keep away from the windows! Quitarse las ventanas!”

  He pulled Lara into the first restroom he saw, a men’s room. Two men, an elderly maintenance worker in wrinkled coveralls and a businessman in a linen suit, stood side by side at urinals. They both looked shocked at the sight of a wild-eyed gringo dragging a woman into this place. They began to object but Mance yelled at them, “Down on the floor! Get down on the floor! There’s going to an explosion! An eruption!”

  “Eruption?” asked the old man, hastily zipping his fly.

  “Erupción grande!” Mance said. “Temblor de tierra! Earthquake!”

  The businessman rushed for the exit while the older man stood there, petrified with sudden fear.

  Mance pushed Lara onto the cold tiles and dropped down beside her, his arm wrapped protectively around her.

  “Mance, how can—”

  “There’s no place to run to,” he hissed in her ear. “If it hits here we’re pulverized.”

  Slowly at first, but then with ever-increasing speed, the skytower’s lower half collapsed to the Earth. Its immense bulk smashed into Ciudad de Cielo, the tethers at its base snapping like strings, the shock wave from its impact blowing down those buildings it did not hit directly. The thunder of its fall shattered the air like the blast of every volcano on Earth exploding at once. Seconds later the falling tower smashed down on the northern suburbs of Quito like a gigantic tree crushing an ant hill. The city’s modern high-rise glass and steel towers, built to withstand earthquakes, wavered and shuddered. Their safety-glass facades blew out in showers of pellets. Ordinary windows shattered into razor-sharp shards that slashed to bloody ribbons the people who crowded the streets, screaming in terror. Older buildings were torn from their foundations as if a nuclear explosion had ripped through the city. The old cathedral’s thick masonry walls cracked and its stained glass windows shattered, each and every one of them. Water pipes ruptured and gas mains broke. Fire and flood took up their deadly work where the sheer explosive impact of the collapse left off.

  And still the tower fell.

  Down the slope that led to the sea, villages and roads and farms and open fields and trees were smashed flat, pulverized, while the shock wave from the impact blew down woodlands and buildings for a hundred kilometers and more in either direction, as if a giant meteor had struck out of the sky. A fishing village fell under the shadow of sudden doom, its inhabitants looking up to see this immense arm of God swinging down on them like the mighty bludgeon of the angel of death.

  And still the tower fell.

  Its length splashed into the Pacific Ocean with a roar that broke eardrums and ruptured the innards of men, beasts, birds, and fish. Across the coastal shelf it plunged and out beyond into the abyssal depths. Whales migrating hundreds of kilometers out to sea were pulped to jelly by the shock wave that raced through the water. The tsunami it raised washed away shoreline settlements up and down the coast and rushed across the Pacific, flooding the Galapagos Islands, already half-drowned by the greenhouse warming. The Pacific coast of Central America was devastated. Hawaii and Japan were struck before their warning systems could get people to move inland. Samoa and Tahiti were hit by a wall of water nearly fifteen meters high that tore away villages and whole cities. People in Los Angeles and Sydney heard the mighty thunderclap and wondered if it was a sonic boom.

  And still the tower fell, splashing all the way across the Pacific, groaning as part of its globe-girdling length sank slowly into the dark abyssal depths. When it hit the spiny tree-covered mountain
backbone of Borneo it snapped in two, one part sliding down the rugged slopes, tearing away forests and villages and plantations as it slithered snake-like across the island.

  The other part plunged across Sumatra and into the Indian Ocean, narrowly missing the long green finger of Malaysia but sending a tsunami washing across the drowned ruins of Singapore. Along the breadth of equatorial Africa it fell, smashing across Kenya, ploughed into the northern reaches of Lake Victoria, drowning the city of Kampala with a tidal wave, and continued westward, crushing cities and forests alike, igniting mammoth forest fires, driving vast herds of animals into panicked, screaming stampedes. Its upper end, still smoking from the titanic electrical discharge that had severed it, plunged hissing into the Atlantic, sinking deep down into the jagged rift where hot magma from the Earth’s core embraced the man-made structure that had, mere minutes earlier, stood among the stars.

  Across the world the once-proud skytower lay amidst a swath of death and desolation and smoking ruin, crushing the life from people, animals, plants, crushing human ambition, human dreams, crushing hope itself.

  Lying flat on the tiles of the airport men’s room, Bracknell felt the floor jump as a roll of thunder boomed over them, so loud that his ears rang. Even so, he heard screams and terrified cries.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Lara, his voice sounding strange, muffled, inside his head.

  She nodded weakly. He saw that her nose was bleeding slightly. Bracknell climbed slowly to his feet. The old man was still lying on the floor, facedown. Bracknell called to him, then nudged his shoulder. The man did not move. Rolling him over, Bracknell saw his soft brown eyes staring out sightlessly.

  “He’s dead,” Lara said. Bracknell could barely hear her over the buzzing in his head.

  Feeling stunned, thick-witted, Bracknell gazed around the windowless men’s room. One of the tiled walls had cracked. Or had it been that way when they had rushed in here?

  “Dead?” he echoed numbly.

  “A heart attack, maybe,” Lara said. She clung close to Bracknell. He could feel her trembling.