Privateers

by Ben Bova

Her dark, luminous eyes searched his soul. “You must not say such things, Daniel. The danger …”

  He placed a finger on her lips. “What danger? Who cares? All they can do is kill me.”

  Lucita kissed his fingertip. “But if you die, amado, I will die too.”

  “No. You’re young … too young to die.”

  “Daniel, I would not live without you. I adore you, my darling Yanqui.”

  He kissed her again and felt her body arching against his. Weightlessly they floated, intertwining, gliding through the silent emptiness.

  “We can never let them know of our love,” Lucita warned.

  “Not let them know?” Dan laughed. “I want to tell the whole world! I want to write it across the sky in letters of fire!”

  “No, no,” she begged, frightened. “They will try to take me away from you.”

  “Never! We’ll run away. Where would you like to live? New Zealand? Tahiti? Shall I buy the Taj Mahal for you and make it your palace? Or build a new world all our own, far out in space where no one can ever reach us?”

  But she was very serious. “Daniel, we cannot run away. I will not be the cause of your giving up everything you have worked so hard to build.”

  “The only thing I want is your love,” he told her. “Nothing else matters.”

  “You have my love, dearest one. You have all my love.”

  Her vibrant young body was flawless, irresistible. She stretched languidly as he stroked every curve of her. Slowly their bodies revolved around each other as their passion rose, skin glistening in the heat of their desire, endlessly floating in the sensuous weightless freedom from all restraints. They were alone in their own universe, nothing else existed: no world, no stars, neither night nor day. Only each other, the electric thrill of flesh on flesh, the whispered moans of delight, the musky scent of arousal climbing to its farthest peak. His mouth on her nipples, her hands sliding along his flanks. He gripped her buttocks and she threw her head back keening as he entered her hard and demanding in one insistent thrust and they heaved and writhed together as her warmth enveloped him and he held her thrashing, sobbing, shouting her pleasure and pain and mad, wild desire.

  Dan’s eyes snapped open.

  For an instant he thought he was back on the construction gang, with the burly old Japanese foreman prodding him to get out of the bunk. But as he focused his sleep-blurred eyes, he saw that it was a stocky Russian captain in the red-trimmed uniform of the Strategic Rocket Corps prodding his middle through the sheet with the muzzle of a stubby pistol. Behind him stood two Russian soldiers holding ugly, snub-nosed machine guns. They fired fléchette darts, Dan recognized. The darts would not penetrate the fragile skin of the space station’s hull, but they had more than enough power to puncture the thin sheet covering Dan’s naked body and the living skin beneath it.

  “Daniel Hamilton Randolph,” said the captain in impeccable midwestern American, “I arrest you for piracy in the name of the Presidium of the Soviet Union and by order of Vasily Malik, chairman of the Soviet Combined Space Forces.”

  Chapter THREE

  In Paris it was drizzling again. Willem Quistigaard sipped at his aperitif, savoring the golden warming glow of the Pemod as he watched the gray, wet evening slip inexorably into the darkness of night.

  “Once they called this the City of Lights,” he said to his young aide, almost sighing at the memory. He was a tall, rawboned man, vigorously active although well into his seventies. His thick hair and mustache still showed traces of gold among the silver. His voice was deep and strong. His big-knuckled hands dwarfed the glass he was holding.

  “The lights are on again,” replied the aide. His youthful face looked puzzled. He had the bland, innocent features of a born bureaucrat. Quistigaard knew that the youngster had gone straight from college into government service. Never been in the real world at all; never experienced a day for which he did not have an agenda already prepared. In triplicate.

  Quistigaard did sigh. It had been a long day, a long week, and now his flight back to Geneva had been delayed several hours. He sat under the awning of the hotel’s sidewalk cafe and watched the few straggling pedestrians scurrying toward their homes in the cold drizzle.

  “I didn’t mean it literally,” he told his aide.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  Quistigaard took another sip of the Pemod and felt its warmth spread inside him. But it didn’t taste the same; not like the old days. Nothing was the same anymore.

  “When I was your age,” he said, “Paris was the most exciting place in the world. At this time of the evening the city was just beginning to come to life. The restaurants! The cars! The women!” He shook his head and gestured halfheartedly toward the emptying streets.

  “If the weather were better …”

  “It’s not the weather. It’s not the weather. It’s here.” Quistigaard tapped two fingers of his right hand against his breast. “The heart’s gone out of Paris. Out of all Europe. It’s all turned gray and dreary.”

  “You’re tired,” the aide murmured sympathetically. “Once the sun comes out and you get some fresh air into your lungs you’ll feel differently. Tomorrow you’ll be on the ski slopes. You’ll feel better then.”

  “I’ll have to fight my way past Russian tourists,” Quistigaard muttered.

  The aide laughed politely. Then, changing the subject quite deliberately, he said, “I thought the conference went rather well. Didn’t you?”

  The older man lifted his shoulders in a weary shrug. “Conferences always go smoothly when all the real work is done before the conference opens.”

  “You did a magnificent job.”

  I suppose there’s some sincerity in that, Quistigaard thought. After all, his job is secure; he doesn’t really have to butter me up.

  But he leaned across the tiny table and said, “The International Astronautical Council is nothing but a rubber stamp for the desires and actions of the Soviet Union. Since I am chairman of the council, that makes me the inkpad for the rubber stamp. You are working for an inkpad.”

  “That’s not true!” the young man blurted, astonished.

  Quistigaard smiled inwardly, pleased to have penetrated his bland façade. If I’m an inkpad, he thought, what does that make my assistant?

  “The conference resolved several very difficult issues,” the aide went on, his voice at least half an octave higher than it had been. “The matter of allocating new orbital slots for communications satellites; the question of disseminating geological data from observations made from orbit …”

  Quistigaard waved him to silence. “Tell me one issue that was decided in a way that the Russians did not approve.”

  The younger man blinked once, twice.

  “You see?” Quistigaard almost laughed. “It was the Soviet government which organized the agenda for the meeting. Every item on the agenda was agreed upon before the first session convened. Every issue went the way the Russians wanted it to go. We shuffled a great many papers. We listened to a number of boring speeches. We sat for four days and held sixteen concurrent sessions.”

  “We accomplished a lot,” the aide muttered, almost sullenly.

  Quistigaard held up his right hand, the thumb and forefinger hardly a centimeter apart. “Not even that much got through that was against the Russians’ wishes. Not one iota of disagreement was allowed. They run the IAC; you and I are merely figureheads.”

  The young man shook his head, frowning.

  “Come on, son, admit it. The Russians own outer space; they run things exactly the way they want to. Just as they run all of Europe.”

  For several moments neither of them said a word. Quistigaard took a long pull on his drink. His aide sipped at his demitasse of coffee and tried to avoid the older man’s eyes.

  The chill was getting to Quistigaard, despite the yellow heat of the Pernod. He pulled his topcoat closer around him and slouched deeper into the rickety chair.

  “They didn’t have to fire a shot, you
know,” he muttered. “Once the Americans backed down, they could have had Europe for free.”

  “It was the French,” the younger man said. “They forced the Soviet retaliation.”

  “Bah! Do you believe what they told you in school? I was there, when it happened.”

  “The war?”

  “It wasn’t a war. It wasn’t even a battle. The Americans announced their withdrawal from NATO. On the day it became effective, one hotheaded French submarine captain fired a missile—probably at the United States, if you ask me. Or maybe he was a Communist agent provocateur, working for the Russians. That thought occurred to me.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  Quistigaard smiled frostily at the young man’s naivete. “Was it? The Soviets announce that they have weapons in orbit that can shoot down ballistic missiles. The United States caves in to Soviet demands and quits NATO. One French submarine—part of their pitiful little Force de Frappe—fires one solitary missile from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A Soviet laser beam destroys the missile within three minutes of its launch. The Soviets then launch a missile of their own and detonate a small hydrogen bomb in space, over Paris. The electromagnetic pulse from that explosion knocks out almost all the electrical power systems and equipment from Iceland to Kraków. No electric lights, cars don’t work, heaters don’t work, telephones don’t work, most of Europe is plunged into darkness and cold. And panic. People were throwing up in the streets out of sheer terror. Then three Soviet cruise missiles hit three French military bases with poison gas warheads.”

  “The French were preparing a counterstrike.”

  “So the history books say. I have my doubts. Most of those texts were written by Russians.”

  “No!”

  “Perhaps I exaggerate,” Quistigaard said, dryly enough to let the young aide know that he did not believe so.

  “But there was no other fighting. There was no nuclear war.”

  “Of course not. With the Americans humbled and Western Europe groping in the dark, there was no need for fighting. The Soviets had made their point. Paris, London, even Bonn fell all over themselves in their eagerness to make their accommodations with the new political situation. The Cold War ended almost overnight. And now you see the result.”

  “Things are getting better.”

  “So I am told.”

  Gazing up and down the wide boulevard, the two men saw a dark, wet, chilly, empty street. A steam-powered bus chuffed by, lumbering and lurching. The sidewalks were bare of people, except for a couple of stocky men in long gray raincoats hurrying along. They looked like Russians to Quistigaard.

  “The Americans,” the young man whispered, almost as if he were talking to himself. “It’s their fault. They abandoned Europe. They left us defenseless.”

  “Yes, that’s true. But they made themselves defenseless first. Once the Soviets established antimissile weapons in space, the American nuclear forces became rather useless.”

  “But why? How could they have been so blind?” Quistigaard lifted his glass again, only to find that it was empty. No waiter was in sight.

  “The Americans got tired,” he said. “They shouldered the burdens of the world for almost a century, and then they got tired of the job. They tried to take the easy way out. They never felt comfortable about world leadership. In their hearts, all they wanted was for the rest of the world to like them. Like little puppydogs. All they wanted was to be petted and told that they were good. They made several very poor decisions, and before they realized what had happened, the Soviets had a decisive military advantage over them.”

  “The antimissile satellites.”

  “That was the straw that broke the Americans’ back,” Quistigaard agreed. “But I think they were relieved to quit the race. I honestly think so. They were always isolationists at heart. They never had Europe’s best interest in mind.”

  “Well, they’re certainly isolated now. They didn’t even send a delegate to the convention.”

  “Why should they? They abandoned their space program. The Soviets have cut off almost all their international trade. They have to learn how to adjust their economy to exist on its internal market alone; for America, there is virtually no overseas trade. I haven’t even seen an American tourist here in Paris. Have you?”

  “It’s not the season … .”

  “No. They’re done for. They’ll strangle on their own bile. A nation that size can’t exist without overseas markets. The United States will self-destruct within another generation, while the Soviets watch and laugh.”

  “And the rest of the world?”

  “Oh, we go through the motions of being independent. China is still strong, but its missiles are just as obsolete as the Americans’, against those lasers the Russians have in space.”

  “But Europe is rebuilding.”

  “Along Soviet guidelines. Even Paris is turning into a dull Socialist grayness.”

  “But the Third World nations are still going their own way. They operate their factories in orbit.”

  “At Soviet sufferance. And I wonder how long that’s going to last. Did you notice the hubbub in the Russian delegation this afternoon? Something is happening, something big. Malik did not attend any of today’s sessions. He wasn’t even at the final plenary meeting.”

  “Yes,” admitted the young man. “That did strike me as odd.”

  “Something’s in the wind,” Quistigaard said gloomily. “Something big is about to happen.”

  Chapter FOUR

  The Russians had seized the entire space station. Venezuelan national territory or not, it was now under Soviet control. The captain and the two soldiers watched stolidly as Dan pulled on his coveralls, then they marched him out of his cabin and down the long sloping corridor that ran the circumference of the huge, revolving wheel. The captain would not answer any of Dan’s questions; none of the Russians said a word after the captain had awakened Dan and announced his arrest. They locked Dan in one of the storerooms and marched off, out of sight.

  Alone, Dan looked around at his improvised jail cell. It was a bare little space, about the size of two telephone booths put together. Three of its walls were heavy wire mesh, the fourth the curving hull of the station structure, slightly cold to the touch despite its thick layers of insulation. The enclosure had been used to store electronics spare parts, Dan remembered. But the Russians had emptied it completely. Just like them, he thought. The first thing they do is turn something useful into a prison cell.

  There was nothing at all in the enclosure: no bunk, no bench, nothing but the bare floor and the overhead strip of fluorescent lighting. Looking out through the heavy wire mesh door, Dan saw that the Russians had set up a TV camera in the storeroom on the other side of the narrow walkway that ran the length of the storage area. He grimaced into the camera, hoping that whoever was monitoring him would be startled, at least for a moment.

  They must have intercepted the flitters, Dan realized. I hope they’re treating the crews all right. Their spy system must have been a lot better than I thought.

  He sank down onto the floor, leaned his back against the stiff metal screen. So ends the illustrious career of the twenty-first century’s premier pirate. It’s all over. They’ll stuff a sponge rubber ball in my mouth and put a bullet through the back of my head. I’ll never see Lucita again. Never have the chance to tell her that I love her.

  He felt more angry than afraid. Frustrated rather than fearful. His hands were steady, his insides calm. The finality of it was too real, too inescapable. There was nothing left to hope for. But so much to regret. So many things he still wanted to do. So many scores still unsettled. And Lucita. His mind kept coming back to her. He tried to tell himself that it would be better for her this way. He would have brought her nothing but pain and turmoil. Now she could marry the damned Russian and live her life and forget about him. Then he looked down at his hands and saw that they were clenched into fists.

  He almost laughed aloud. You’re
not very good at being noble, are you?

  It was laughable. A cosmic joke. And it was going to end very soon. The Russians would not take any chances. Bang, you’re dead. And their problems with space piracy are solved. Their monopoly of space is preserved. The rest of the world gets shown who’s boss. With one shot.

  Lucita. Can it be that I’ve only known her for less than a year? Funny how time can stretch and contract. How a second can seem as long as infinity. How years can race past and disappear before you realize it. He rested his head against the wire screen and squinted up at the flickering fluorescent tube overhead. The day I met her. The very first day. It was raining. Yes. Poured all day. That’s the day I met Malik, too. And Zach Freiberg.

  “‘Like the drip, drip, drip of the raindrops,’” Dan quoted under his breath. Then, aloud, he grumbled, “Damn Cole Porter!”

  His office window was leaking again. Nothing much, just enough to make an annoying dripping sound and form a soggy puddle in the thick carpeting. The rain teemed down with biblical fury. Dan stood impatiently at the wide, sweeping window of his office and stared out at the downpour. It was as if God were dousing Caracas with a celestial fire hose, pouring torrents of water, solid sheets of it, all over the city. Normally Dan could see the green hills that rose up beyond the city’s boundary and the cable towers for the tramway that went over the mountain to the port at La Guaira. And the wretched squatters’ shacks of cardboard and plywood that infested those hills. But not today. He could barely make out Bolivar Square, just a few streets away from his office tower, in the intensity of the downpour.

  Brand-new building and it leaks like a sieve, he complained to himself. Where the hell’s the damned maintenance man? Called him an hour ago. Christ, even in Houston the service was better than this.

  His office was on the top floor of the tallest skyscraper in Caracas. It was the office of a man of enormous wealth and power, rich without being garish, imposing without being intimidating. Dan grinned at himself in the faint reflection from the rain-streaked window. At least the roof doesn’t leak, he thought. Then he added, Not yet.