Privateers

by Ben Bova

  The car moved smoothly up the green mountain, swaying only slightly as it glided high above the squatters’ shacks of cardboard and plywood. Lucita saw ragged children playing down in the weeds and bare, worn ground between the shacks. Goats were tethered here and there; the area was filthy with litter and piles of garbage.

  Looking up, though, she saw the blessed gray mist of the clouds that clung almost always to the mountain’s upper slopes. Oblivion. She wished the car would hurry into it.

  But once surrounded by the gray featureless mist, with nothing to see but drops of condensed moisture trickling past her own dim reflection in the window, Lucita’s mind returned to that terrible night in the Russian space station.

  Her visit in Russia had been happy enough, although she could never escape the feeling of being watched every moment. Teresa was enjoying herself, and Malik seemed determined to show her that he was an attentive, urbane and charming host. It was clear that his position in the government was very high; Lucita found herself being treated like royalty.

  She had never been in space before, and when Malik asked if she would like to visit one of the Soviet space cities, she agreed eagerly. Not until that night, when she and Teresa were alone in the luxury apartment that Malik had obtained for them, did she learn that Teresa was terrified of the idea of leaving the Earth.

  Lucita laughed at her young aunt’s fears and the two of them, accompanied by Malik and a handful of his young aides, rode a Soviet shuttle to Kosmograd. It was like an airplane ride, nothing more, except that there were no windows to look through. The space station was much larger than Lucita had expected, and after a few days, even Teresa had to admit that she felt almost as if they were still on solid ground.

  They tried zero-gravity gliding in the space station’s huge, spherical gymnasium. Lucita found it wonderfully exhilarating Teresa got sick and had to return to their cabin where gravity was normal.

  Malik made overtures to Lucita, but she thought they were more formalities that he believed were expected from him rather than signs of real ardor. It was like an old-fashioned, old-world courting, where the swain might hold the young beauty’s hand-but only under the watchful eye of her duenna. Lucita found it amusing. Malik appeared to expect nothing more. He even seemed surprised when she kissed him good night at her cabin door after they had spent the evening watching the Earth glide by through the big window in the space station’s main observation center.

  After three days, Malik had to return to Moscow. At Lucita’s insistence, he made arrangements for the two women to go home to Caracas. Since there were no direct flights from Kosmograd, the Russian arranged a transfer to Nueva Venezuela; from there they could return home easily.

  Their last night together, Malik invited Lucita to dinner in his quarters, alone. She hesitated long enough to let him know she considered this very forward, then agreed. He was utterly polite, to the point where Lucita wondered if there was any passion for her in him.

  He smiled from across the candlelit table and, as if reading her thoughts, told her, “I hope you understand how much self-control I have had to exert these past few weeks.”

  “Self-control?” Lucita echoed.

  His pale blue eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “I am not accustomed to the formalities of a Latin courtship, you know. We Russians are generally more … um, impetuous in our wooing.”

  Lucita reached for her wine goblet and took a sip before replying, “Have you swept many women off their feet with your impetuousness?”

  “You’re laughing at me,” he said. There was no rancor in it.

  “Vasily,” Lucita replied, “we have seen each other every day for more than two weeks now, but we are still little more than strangers.”

  “Yet we are to be married.”

  “Someday,” she admitted. “Perhaps.”

  “I …” The smile faded from his lips. For just a moment he looked troubled. “I have been very formal with you. I understand that you will need time to get to know me, and to accept the fact that we will be man and wife-someday. I don’t want to do anything that would offend you, or your father. Yet …”

  She waited for him to finish the thought. When he did not, she prompted, “Yet?”

  Reaching across the table to take her hand in both of his, Malik said, “You are very beautiful, Lucita. And very desirable. I want you very much.”

  For an instant her pulse quickened. But then she saw something in his pale eyes, something that not even candlelight could disguise, something cold and calculating.

  “What would my father say?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

  He released her hand. “Yes. I know.”

  “I think I should go back to my room now,” Lucita said.

  “Damn politics!” Malik slammed his napkin to the floor. But he got to his feet and escorted Lucita back to her cabin door. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him good night. He held her around the waist and pressed her close, the first time he had done so.

  “I want this to be more than a political marriage, Lucita,” he whispered. “I want you to love me.”

  She closed her eyes and thought of her father and the other marriages of hypocrisy she knew in Caracas, where the wives accompanied their husbands on social occasions and seldom saw them otherwise, where the men could be seen in nightclubs with their young mistresses while the wives stayed home with their broods of children.

  “It takes time, Vasily,” she whispered back to him. “Please don’t rush me.”

  He smiled and took her hand and kissed it like a cavalier of old, then walked away. As she opened the unlocked cabin door, Lucita began to wonder if the calculations she saw in his eyes concerned her or something else.

  Teresa lay sprawled on the floor of the cabin, her skirt torn from her body, her blouse bunched up at her shoulders. There was blood on her bare thighs, bruises across her naked torso. The imprint of a hand welted one bare breast. Shreds of panty hose clung to her calfs.

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Lucita …” she moaned.

  A scream caught in Lucita’s throat. But she could not make a sound, horrified though she was. She dropped to her knees beside her young aunt.

  “What happened? Teresa, what happened?”

  “They raped me… .”

  “Mother of God! Who did this? How could they …”

  She lifted Teresa’s head from the floor. One eye was swollen shut. Blood crusted her lips.

  The rest was a nightmare. She phoned Malik for help as Teresa mumbled her nearly incoherent story. Two young crewmen. She had taken dinner in the station’s main galley. They had sat at the same table with her. They spoke no Spanish, Teresa spoke no Russian. She said nothing to them. She ate and returned to her cabin. They followed her and called after her as she hurried down the corridor. There was no lock on the door; they burst in. She tried to phone. She tried to fight them off. They beat her brutally and took turns raping her.

  Malik arrived, white-faced with rage. A doctor came. An officer in uniform. They tried to question Teresa, but she was shaking with terror and shame now. The officer was some sort of policeman. He and Malik conversed in low, urgent voices and he left. Lucita and the doctor helped Teresa to her bed. The doctor gave her an injection to make her sleep.

  “We’ll find the men who did this,” Malik said, his eyes glinting like the steel blade of a knife. “I promise you, they will be found and punished.”

  After all the men left, Lucita sat up in her bed next to Teresa’s and watched the sleeping young woman. She did not move, barely breathed. Lucita drowsed, her head slumping down to her chest, her eyes too heavy to keep open.

  When she awoke, Teresa’s rumpled bed was empty. Startled, Lucita jumped to her feet. She saw that the light in the cubbyhole of a bathroom was on. Teresa was huddled in the shower stall, both wrists slashed open, her agonized face staring sightlessly up at Lucita, her life’s blood already turning brown and crusty as it seeped down the shower drain.

  The cable car broke
out of the gray mist and bright Venezuelan sunshine flooded in through the big windows. Lucita squeezed her eyes shut, and the vision of Teresa’s dead body melted away like the drops of condensed moisture on the glass before her. She took a deep, shuddering breath and brought herself back to the world of today.

  The car glided to a stop in its terminal at the foot of the mountain and its pneumatic doors slid open. The eight other people aboard shuffled out slowly, almost silently. Lucita was the last to leave. And standing there on the concrete platform, waiting for her, was the tall, blond figure of Vasily Malik.

  Somehow, she was not surprised. Lucita knew that there was no place on Earth, or even beyond it, where she could hide from this man.

  He was wearing a military uniform of tan with red trim at the collar. It made him look more handsome than ever. A dozen yards away, two men in dark civilian suits stood watching. Bodyguards for Vasily? Lucita wondered. Or jailers for me?

  “Lucita …“He reached out a hand toward her, tentatively.

  “Hello, Vasily.” She decided not to ask him how he had found her there. The black car following her on the highway had been Russian, not police. They had followed her to the cable car terminal, and Vasily had helicoptered to the other end of the line, obviously.

  “You left Kosmograd before we had a chance to apprehend the … those who …”

  “I brought my aunt’s body back to her home. We buried her last week.”

  “I never got the chance to tell you how sorry I am, how much I regret that this happened.”

  “I’m sure you do, Vasily.”

  People were making their way across the platform to enter the waiting cable car. Malik put out his arm to guide Lucita back toward the rear of the platform, where the steps led down to the parking lot. She moved before his hand could touch her. He let his arm drop and walked alongside her.

  “We caught the two men responsible. A pair of Ukrainian mechanics.” He said it as if he were describing noisome vermin. “They were drunk and they thought that your aunt was … well, they made the mistake of their lives.”

  “Are they still alive?” Lucita asked coldly.

  Malik said, “Yes, but they both wish otherwise by now,

  I’m sure. I had them sent to the lunar mines. Hard labor. They’ll never see the Earth again.”

  As they stepped out of the cool shade-of the concrete-roofed terminal and into the burning noontime sun, Malik said, “I hope that this terrible tragedy doesn’t come between us, Lucita. I hope you don’t blame me for what happened.”

  She looked up at him as they walked down the concrete steps and saw that he was very grave, very sincere. “No, Vasily. I know it wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”

  “That’s not possible!”

  As she spoke the words, Lucita realized that they were true. “It was my fault. All my fault. I dragged Teresa around the world with me. I left her alone that night. I fell asleep when I should have been watching over her. I killed her.”

  He stopped in the middle of the long stairway and turned to her. “You mustn’t think that. The victim is not responsible for the crime. It was the fault of two drunken louts, and they are paying for their outrage.”

  And I must pay, also, Lucita told herself. I must stop running away from my responsibilities. I must become an adult and accept the duties that have fallen to me. There is no escaping it. I will marry this man whether I love him or not. Whether he loves me or not. There is no escaping it.

  Chapter NINETEEN

  For more than two months Dan went through the motions of leading a normal life. Normal for him. He worked at his office in Caracas. He visited the launch center off the coast at least twice a week. He changed secretaries almost regularly; the joke around the office was that no secretary of Dan Randolph’s lasted longer than her menstrual cycle.

  He traveled up to Nueva Venezuela regularly, but stayed at the space station only briefly each time before riding a slim, needle-shaped transfer craft over to the factory. A new module had been added to the orbital manufacturing facility: a smallish metal globe that was connected to the factory’s control center by a jutting length of tube which served as a corridor to connect the two.

  The new globe had nothing to do with the factory’s operations. It was a control center, small and stripped down by comparison to the control centers the old NASA once operated at Houston and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, but immediately recognizable by its banks of video screen monitors manned by intense men and women with earphones and pin mikes clamped to their heads.

  Hanging in mid-air weightlessly next to the mission controller, a big, athletic-looking Angolan named Njombe, Zach Freiberg looked almost like a fugitive from a nursery. But Freiberg put in more hours at the control center than anyone. He was the scientific leader of the asteroid mission; he was living aboard Nueva Venezuela and spending eighteen-hour days in the control center, following every move, every breath and heartbeat of Dolphin One’s eight-man crew.

  Dan would pop in for a few minutes, see that the spacecraft was coasting on schedule toward the chunk of rock floating through space, listen to the routine chatter between the crew and the mission controllers, and return to the space station to put in the semblance of ordinary business. If the Russians actually knew about the asteroid mission, they were not giving any hint of it. All Dan’s intelligence probes and bribes had returned no information, no sign that the Russians were aware of what was going on.

  Freiberg would return to the space station every few days with a batch of videotapes, and at night he would play the edited highlights of the past days’ communications for Dan, behind the locked door of his quarters aboard Nueva Venezuela.

  “All’s well as can be expected,” Carstairs reported on the mission’s fortieth day. “Electrical power’s down six percent from nominal; I’ve scheduled an EVA for tomorrow to check the solar panels. Might be a micrometeor cracked one of the cells. Or maybe dust coating ‘em.” His Australian accent said “mybe.”

  The voice of one of the mission controllers said, “We copy the tail off in electrical power. EVA is approved.” He said it over Carstairs’ continued talking, because it took his laser-borne words slightly more than a full minute to reach the spacecraft, nearly twelve million miles away. Because of the time lag in communications, there were no conversations between the spacecraft and the control center; they had two nearly simultaneous monologues instead.

  “The bloody toilet’s acting up again,” Carstairs was complaining. “In all these years of battin’ about in space you’d think somebody would come up with a zero-gee toilet that actually works. And the air scrubbers are gettin’ marginal. Nothing the instruments will show, but it’s startin’ to smell foul in here. Damn tight living, y’know.” Carstairs grinned. “I think I’m fallin’ in love with Halloran.”

  Halloran, the young geochemist from Chicago, happened to be just behind Carstairs at that moment. His beefy face turned as red as his brick-colored hair.

  “Don’t let him fool you, Halloran,” said the mission controller, “it’s just a shipboard romance.”

  But while the joke was speeding toward the spacecraft on the laser beam, Halloran-still red-faced-spluttered a denial laced with as much profanity as he knew. Which was neither large in quantity nor original in quality.

  Dan laughed, sitting in his darkened cabin, lit only by the TV screen. Freiberg grinned too. Dan had insisted that all the crew members be male and heterosexual. He wanted no romantic entanglements of any kind during this long, difficult mission. He did not bother asking his company psychologists about it: why risk a security leak when he already was convinced of what he wanted? Thinking back to his own days as a working astronaut, he remembered that masturbation is much less damaging than murder.

  With the inexorable precision of astronomical mathematics, the spacecraft made its rendezvous with the asteroid. Dan spent that whole day in the crowded, tense control center, in the back of the hot, sweaty room where he could surv
ey the entire chamber easily. The circular chamber was dimmed, lit mainly by the glowing TV screens and banks of lighted control studs that lined each controller’s desk.

  It was one thing to read a report that the asteroid was not much longer than a football field. It was quite another to see this enormous boulder tumbling slowly as it glided through space. It was only slightly oblong, almost as thick as its length, and big. Its dark, brooding ponderousness dwarfed the approaching spacecraft.

  Dan watched in rapt silence. The control center crackled with nervous electricity. Freiberg, down at the center of the string of monitoring desks, was literally quivering with excitement. Dan could see that the scientist could hardly stay still; his hands were fluttering like a pair of large moths drawn to the light of the TV picture in front of him. He jittered as he dangled weightlessly in front of his monitor screen, jouncing and bouncing so much that he occasionally floated too far off the floor and had to pull himself down again. He had grown so accustomed to the zero gravity of the factory that he hardly noticed his own antics. But Dan laughed to himself. Better put a safety tether on Zach or he’ll float right out of here.

  The mission controllers were watching their instruments and muttering into their headsets in the muted whispers of worshipers in a cathedral.

  Christ, I wish I was there, Dan said to himself as he watched the main display screen, which took up most of the room’s front wall.

  The spacecraft’s outside cameras showed views of the massive, looming asteroid. It was black and pitted, its surface lumpy and irregular. It reminded Dan of a huge chunk of coal.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” Freiberg’s voice sang through the darkness. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”

  A few low chuckles answered.