Privateers

by Ben Bova

  “I’m going to Japan tonight,” Dan heard himself say, casually, almost carelessly, as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other. “Would you care to come with me?”

  She whirled to face him again. “To Japan? Tonight?”

  “It’s only a quick business trip, a couple of nights at most.”

  “Tonight? When?”

  He glanced at his wristwatch. “The flight takes a couple of hours. I thought I’d leave around ten tonight; that’ll put us in Japan by midafternoon, their time.”

  “You would take me with you?”

  He thought briefly about her father and the difficulties the Minister of Technology could cause. But he said, “Sure, if you want to come.”

  “I do!”

  Dan felt suddenly giddy. “Okay,” he said, grinning. “Meet me at the old airport between nine-thirty and nine forty-five. I’ll leave word at the gate for the guard to expect you.”

  “Oh, wonderful!” Lucita seemed as excited as a little child on Christmas Eve. She put her champagne glass down on the edge of the planter by the window and headed past the inert robot, toward the doors. “I must pack a bag and see that my car is ready. I’ll tell my father that I’m visiting my Tia Teresa-she can be my duenna for the trip.”

  “Duenna?”

  “My chaperon. I could not go without a chaperon, of course. You will like her. She is a wonderful person.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “A phone. I must use your phone. May I … ?”

  Dan pointed toward the living room. Lucita dashed off, leaving him standing there with his glass of champagne in his hand, feeling rather foolish.

  Chapter TEN

  Aunt Teresa turned out to be not much older than Lucita herself. Two girls barely out of their teens, Dan thought. Lucita drove a low-slung sports car out onto the runway apron and parked it with a squeal of brakes next to his own limousine. She and her chaperon climbed out, excited as schoolgirls, as one of Dan’s technicians took the car keys from Lucita and opened the trunk. At least they’ve packed sensibly, Dan saw; only four bags between them.

  Lucita was wearing a loose-fitting jumpsuit of powder blue, cinched at the waist with a wide silver mesh belt. Her hair was neatly tied back into a girlish ponytail. Her duenna wore a peasant’s wide skirt, dark purple decorated with tiny embroidered flowers, and an off-the-shoulder white blouse that accentuated her full bosom. The ground crew men ogled the two of them; even the women of the crew stared openly. Lucita ignored them, but Teresa seemed to notice their attention and enjoy it.

  The hypersonic plane was parked at the edge of the apron, its silvered skin glittering under the airport floodlights. It was a smaller version of the passenger liners that crossed the

  Pacific in an hour, taking off like a normal airplane, then lighting off its rocket engines to arc high above the ocean in a ballistic trajectory and finally reentering the atmosphere like a space shuttle to land at a commercial airport.

  Dan welcomed the two young ladies and personally escorted them to the plane. Teresa could not be more than a year or two older than Lucita, he thought. Some chaperon. She was good-looking, with the typical dark coloring of the Latin woman, an inch or so taller than Lucita and noticeably rounder, the kind of woman who would be on diets all her life. She would have looked very attractive to Dan if she had not been accompanying Lucita.

  Stop thinking about it, Dan commanded himself. She’s just a kid. A breathtakingly beautiful kid who probably thinks of you the same way she thinks of her father. You’re an older adult to her, not a romantic possibility. But another voice in his head countered sardonically, It would be fun to teach her otherwise.

  He showed the two girls around the plush interior of his plane while the pilots were checking out the engines and controls. They marveled at the deep leather seats that could swivel in a complete circle, and the pull-out tables and computer terminals and phone consoles built into the bulkhead by each chair.

  “How does a man get to be so rich?” Lucita asked. Teresa barely suppressed a giggle.

  Dan replied seriously, “None of this belongs to me personally. My own real wealth is comparatively small, I’m afraid.”

  “Really?” There was a challenge in Lucita’s eyes, almost a mockery.

  With a slow smile, Dan answered, “Really. I’m barely a millionaire.”

  She laughed, and he enjoyed it.

  “But tell me truly,” Lucita insisted, “how did you achieve all this?”

  Teresa had already lost interest in this subject, Dan saw.

  She went up forward to strike up a conversation with the pilots as they checked out their instruments.

  Feeling a little awkward, Dan motioned Lucita to a chair and took the one facing it.

  “You were not born rich,” she said. The teasing tone had left her voice. Her face was earnest now. “I have read about your life. You were an astronaut. …”

  Nodding, he said, “I went to Japan to work on the first solar power satellite. Even back then, the United States wasn’t moving ahead in space as fast as other nations.”

  “And then you lived on the Moon?”

  “Before the Russians took over all the facilities there, yes.”

  “But how did you become so wealthy?”

  Dan was tempted to evade her question, to crack a joke and get off the subject. But instead, he heard himself say, “Two ways: slowly at first, and then very quickly.”

  She waited for him to explain.

  “While I was working in space and on the Moon I earned a very good salary. And bonuses. I invested almost all of it in space industries. By the time I left the Moon to return to Earth, I was able to convince a few bankers to loan me enough money to start Astro Manufacturing Corporation. The first few years were difficult, but once we started delivering zero-gee alloys and pharmaceuticals to markets on Earth, the corporation became very profitable. I sunk most of my earnings back into the corporation, to help it grow.”

  “I see,” Lucita said. “You are a man of vision.”

  Dan accepted the compliment with a shrug. He did not mention that the man who convinced the bankers in Houston to invest in this unknown astronaut-engineer was Morgan Scan well, who later became president of the United States. He did not tell her that he moved his corporation to Caracas when Scanwell was forced by the Russians to dismantle all American space activities. He did not tell her that his widow, now the first woman to be president, blamed him for her husband’s death. Or that the two of them had been lovers behind his best friend’s back.

  Instead, Dan pushed all those memories away and politely asked the young Venezuelan girl, “Have you had dinner?”

  Lucita said no, so Dan asked the stewardess to fix her and her aunt something from the galley. Teresa came back from the flight deck and Dan gave her the chair he had been sitting in, glad to get away from Lucita’s questions and the pain of the past.

  “Anything for you, sir?” the stewardess asked, giving Dan her best smile. She was tall and tempting, a drama student who had applied for work at a Los Angeles agency that specialized in hiring temporary help for major corporations.

  He shook his head. “I’m just going to try to take a nap,” he said.

  Dan took a chair farther back near the tail of the plane, buckled his safety belt and leaned back into the soft leather upholstery. Lucita and her aunt sat across from each other, chattering rapidly in Spanish as the plane taxied out to the runway, hesitated a few moments, then hurled itself down the concrete ribbon with a furious roar of sheer power, angling steeply up into the night sky. Dan saw the lights of Caracas flash past, then felt the surge of even more insistent power as the pilot cut in the rocket engines that would thrust the plane high above the sensible atmosphere. He glanced at the girls. They were still gabbling away, oblivious to the plane’s speed and angle of climb.

  Kids, Dan told himself. Well, at least she’s not afraid of flying. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, while either Lucita or Teresa turned on
the plane’s entertainment system to the loud, thumping beat of the latest latino reggae-rock music. Dan willed himself not to dream, and if he did dream, at least he remembered nothing of it when he awoke.

  Four hours later, Dan sat on the straw mats of Saito Yamagata’s living room floor, sipping hot Japanese tea and trying to convince himself that it was four o’clock in the afternoon and not three in the morning. The room was virtually bare of furnishings; nothing but an exquisitely lacquered low table bearing the tea service, and a pair of matched silk paintings on the walls to either side. Through the triple-glazed glass shoji screen that formed one side of the room, Dan could see the snow-covered mountains that sparkled in the afternoon sunshine. None of them was as perfect as the divine cone of Fujiyama, but the mountains were very pretty. They reminded Dan of Colorado and years gone by that could never be recaptured.

  “It was good of you to come all this way to see me,” said Yamagata. He wore a Western-style business suit, perfectly tailored for his burly, short-limbed build. His round, smiling face had lines etched into it that Dan had not seen before, marks of worry.

  “I’ll never phone you at six A.M. again,” Dan said wearily. “Your revenge is too swift.”

  Yamagata laughed, a hearty belly-shaking bellow that reminded Dan of the old days.

  “I got the feeling,” Dan said, “that you wanted to talk to me in private.”

  The Japanese magnate grew serious. “Yes. It was necessary for us to have absolute confidence in the privacy of our discussion. This house is guarded by men whose families have served my family for many generations. We can speak here without fear of being overheard.”

  “Good.”

  “You are concerned about the Russians’ decision to increase the price of their lunar ores.”

  “More than that,” Dan said. “It’s their stranglehold on us that bothers me. By controlling the mines on the Moon they control the raw materials that we use in our orbital factories. They’ve got their hands at our throat every minute of every day of every year.”

  Yamagata closed his eyes and nodded.

  “Sooner or later they’re going to shut us down completely. You know that, don’t you?”

  His friend said sadly, “They may close down your factories, Daniel, but not mine. You are an American. …”

  “Expatriate.”

  “But still an American. They fear you. They hate you.”

  “So do most Americans,” Dan muttered.

  “Nevertheless,” Yamagata went on, “the Russians would be happy to close down your space operations. Only the fact that you have worked under the flag of Venezuela has stayed their hand-so far.”

  “They don’t want to make the Third World mad at them, I know.”

  “But they will find a pretext for closing down all the other nations’ space stations and all their factories. It is merely a matter of time.”

  “That includes you,” Dan pointed out.

  “Perhaps not,” said Yamagata. “The Japanese space stations are under the informal protection of the People’s Republic of China. Not even the Soviet Union has the courage to displease the Chinese.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not for some time to come. China never relied so heavily on its nuclear missiles that it became powerless once the Russians perfected their space defenses. The Chinese still believe in manpower.”

  “With their population, why not?”

  “A billion and a half, at latest count.”

  “Christ, they could walk to Moscow and the Russians wouldn’t be able to stop them.”

  Yamagata pursed his lips. “The situation is not that simple, but suffice to say that for the foreseeable future the Russians do not desire to antagonize the Chinese, and China looks favorably upon Japan’s space-based industries.”

  “They’re your principal market, aren’t they?”

  “For products manufactured in orbit, yes, of course. We sell quite a bit to India, too, despite their own space factories. We underprice them!” He laughed again.

  “So you’re safe.”

  “For the time being,” Yamagata repeated.

  “And this Russian price increase?”

  “We are attempting to negotiate an exception, although I don’t think we will succeed. If not, then we will simply pass the cost on to our customers.”

  “That’s something I can’t do,” Dan muttered.

  “You mean that the government of Venezuela will not allow you to do it.”

  Dan smiled at his old friend. “Right. I don’t own the operation, I just make the decisions and run the show.”

  “A twenty-five percent increase in your costs would undoubtedly drive your operation into the red.”

  “And how!”

  “Then what do you propose to do?”

  “Get around them.”

  “How?”

  Dan turned his gaze from his friend’s careworn face to the snowy mountains in the distance, then looked back at Yamagata again. “You know me, Sai. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. …”

  “To wherever the going is easier,” Yamagata finished for him. “Yes, I remember your motto. But where will the going be easier for you?”

  “The asteroids.”

  Yamagata drew in his breath with an audible hiss. “Ahh. I should have guessed.”

  “For every ounce of raw materials on the Moon, there’s tons and tons of the same stuff in the asteroids.”

  “And heavy metals, as well.”

  “Damned right! Enough iron in one little asteroid to feed Japan’s steel industry for twenty years.”

  “And there are thousands of such asteroids.”

  “Millions of ‘em!” Dan said. “Sai, some of the smaller ones-just a few hundred meters across-are worth ten billion dollars apiece, easily. Not to mention what the mile-long ones are worth.”

  “An expedition to the asteroids will be very costly, though,”

  Yamagata mused. “And time-consuming. They lie beyond the orbit of Mars, don’t they?”

  “Most of them,” Dan agreed. “But a few of them come closer. A lot closer. Some of them even cross Earth’s orbit.”

  “So? You propose to reach one of these closer rocks?”

  “Yes. Reach it and bring it back to Nueva Venezuela for processing.”

  “A daring plan. I had expected nothing less from you, my old friend.”

  Dan accepted it as a compliment. He took a sip of the hot, clear tea, then put the fragile cup back on the tray before him. His thighs were beginning to ache slightly; he had not sat cross-legged like this for so long in many years.

  He took a deep breath, almost letting the air hiss between his teeth in the Japanese way of showing respect. “You probably know what I’m going to ask for next, Sai.”

  Yamagata gave a grunting, chuckling laugh. “Money, what else?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Yes. Even to capture a nearby asteroid will require a considerable investment.”

  “I thought perhaps Yamagata Industries and Astro Manufacturing could go half and half. …”

  “Yamagata Industries can do nothing,” the Japanese said. But before Dan could object, he smiled and raised a placating hand. “There are certain delicacies to be observed, you see.”

  Dan raised his eyebrows.

  “I too am faced with a government that is reluctant to incur the anger of the Soviet Union. Even with Chinese protection, the government of Japan moves very cautiously in such matters.”

  “The goddamned Russians have got everybody bullied,” Dan grumbled.

  “But there are certain affiliates of Yamagata Industries which operate in Okinawa and the Philippine Islands,” Yamagata explained. “They, in turn, have associates in Europe. You would have no objection if your funding comes from a Swiss bank, would you?”

  Grinning, Dan replied, “None whatsoever. Not even the Russians have been able to buffalo the gnomes of Zurich.”

  “Good. We can discuss the exact term
s and other details later.”

  “I’m heading back to Caracas tomorrow, Sai.”

  “Yes, I thought you would be. I must attend a director’s meeting tomorrow, in Osaka.”

  “So we’ll have to talk out the details before we both head our separate ways.”

  Yamagata nodded. “After dinner, then. For the present I want you to meet my son.”

  “Nobuhiko? I thought he’d be out skiing.”

  “He is here.” Yamagata clapped his hands once. “We have been quite alone, Daniel. The sound activates the house’s intercom system.” In a louder voice, he called his son’s name.

  Dan reached for his teacup again. It was blood red, with a tiny white heron painted in flight. Before he could put the cup down, the light paper shoji screen to his right slid back and a tall, slim, smiling Japanese youth in his early twenties stepped into the room. For an instant Dan blinked in surprise. The young man’s face was exactly how Saito had looked years ago, when Dan had first met him, up at the construction site of the first solar power satellite project.

  Nobuhiko Yamagata made a deep bow. Dan scrambled to his feet, grateful to stretch his legs after sitting on the floor so long.

  “Nobo … you’re a grown man!”

  Nobuhiko grinned and bowed again. “Mr. Hamilton, it is such a pleasure to see you once again.”

  The young man wore skintight ski pants and a windbreaker, both bright blue with white stripes running down the sleeves and legs. His face was youthfully lean, but still the round, flat-nosed shape of his father’s. His cheeks were reddened by a morning spent out in the cold and wind of the ski slopes.

  Nobo sat on his father’s left, facing Dan, with his back to the view of the mountains. The robot servant rolled in with a fresh pot of tea and a cup for the young man. Yamagata did the pouring in silence, with great care.

  After they had each sipped the scaldingly hot tea, Yamagata said, “Nobo has been working for the past year as a deep-space pilot. But there is little for him to do at Yamagata Station.”

  “I’ve flown our orbital ferries,” Nobo said. His voice was a clear, pleasant tenor, full of energy and eagerness.