Privateers

by Ben Bova

  Chalons laughed. Al Hashimi snorted impatiently and stubbed out his cigarette in the stainless-steel ashtray that had been set at his place.

  Vavuniya said, “But we cannot simply take the ores out of the Soviet freighters.”

  “Why not?” Dan countered. “The Soviet Union does not own the ores. Legally, they can be used by any nation which can obtain them. The fact that we pay the Russians to dig them up from the Moon and bring them to our factories does not give them title to the stuff. Legally, we’re merely paying them for transporting the raw materials to us.”

  “But they would never-”

  Dan silenced him with a curt gesture. “The Russians themselves are using that argument in the World Court against Astro Manufacturing. They claim that the asteroid material my spacecraft was carrying did not legally belong to Astro, and they had a perfect right to confiscate it.”

  “Ah,” said Kolwezi. “there’s a difference. Astro Manufacturing is a private corporation. It isn’t a nation. The law does not allow private corporations the same protections that it gives to nations.”

  “It’s a tricky legal point,” Dan admitted. “But each of us operates under the banner of a sovereign nation. Why shouldn’t Zaire-or India, or Japan-go out and take the ores we need for our factories?”

  “Because the Russians would use their lasers to destroy our factories,” Chalons said.

  “Or they would guard their freighters,” suggested Nobo.

  “There are a hundred ways they could stop us,” al Hashimi said.

  “Maybe,” said Dan. “But they’d have to exert themselves. They’d have to use force of one kind or another. They’d have to show the world-and the World Court-that they are using their power against the best interests of the smaller, independent nations.”

  Vavuniya blinked his big, brown, liquid eyes. “I see. I understand. The Soviets would be in the position of obviously bullying the other nations. World opinion would be marshaled against them.”

  “Right.”

  “Since when has world opinion bothered them?” al Hashimi countered disdainfully. “Especially when their vital interests are at stake?”

  “All I’m saying,” Dan urged, “is that we can make it tough for them to squeeze us out of space. We can raise their costs so high that they’ll stop trying to get rid of us. We can’t overturn the Soviet Union, I know that. But we can prevent them from ruining us, if we act boldly enough.”

  “At the risk of having our factories destroyed and our nations threatened with nuclear retaliation?” Kolwezi asked.

  Dan grinned at him. “You wouldn’t be sitting at this table if you hadn’t taken some risks during your life.”

  “True,” the Zairian admitted. “But this …”

  “It’s this or we’re finished. The Russians are moving to push us out of space entirely. You know that.”

  From the far end of the table, Nobo asked, “You, sir, have already been personally threatened by Soviet actions. Two persons have been murdered, and it seems likely that you are marked for assassination by the KGB. Wouldn’t it be easier for the Soviets to counter any moves we make by eliminating us as individuals?”

  Dan looked down the length of the table at his old friend’s son. “None of us is exactly defenseless, on the personal level. And I think that the murders have a personal motivation, not a political one.”

  “Still …”

  “No course of action is without risks,” Dan said. “Personal as well as corporate and national.”

  “You are asking us to commit piracy,” al Hashimi said.

  “The Russians will call it piracy,” Dan admitted cheerfully. “But we have strong legal arguments to the contrary.”

  “They’ll seize our factories,” Chalons insisted. “Or blow them to pieces.”

  “Not if they don’t know which factories to attack,” said Dan. “For God’s sake, we’re not going to advertise what we’re doing! There are six factory complexes in orbit-seven, if we can bring the Chinese into this. The Russians can’t attack them all, and surely we’re smart enough to keep them guessing as to who’s doing what to whom.”

  “They’ll protect their freighters, put guards aboard or escort them with armed spacecraft.”

  “In time,” Dan admitted, “maybe they will. But it will cost them a fortune. It’d be much easier for them to negotiate a lower price for the ores.”

  Nobo mused, “They would have a difficult time protecting every freighter all the time. That would tie up hundreds of men, perhaps thousands.”

  Al Hashimi turned his sardonic smile toward Dan. “And it would reflect very poorly on the new chief of their space programs.”

  Dan grinned back at him. “Yes, it might, at that.”

  Tapping both his hands on the tabletop, Vavuniya said enthusiastically, “After all. the ores are very certainly the common property of all humankind. We have as much right to them as anyone.”

  “Are you all mad?” Chalons asked. “The Russians won’t hesitate for a second to use armed force against us.”

  “Then we must have protection,” said Kolwezi.

  “Perhaps China would be willing to back us,” al Hashimi suggested. “Not publicly, of course. But a quiet guarantee of protection against Soviet retaliation. …”

  “Or the United States,” Vavuniya said.

  Al Hashimi sneered. “The United States would never dare to challenge Russia. The Americans have given up. They don’t have the spirit to stand up and fight.”

  Dan felt his teeth clench painfully, but he said nothing.

  Nobuhiko offered, “I believe that my father might be willing to contact certain people in the Chinese government and sound them out about this plan.”

  “Good,” said Dan.

  “And you,” Vavuniya urged, turning from al Hashimi’s stern visage to Dan, “you should sound out the American government. You were a close friend of the American President, were you not?”

  “Long ago,” Dan replied.

  Kolwezi shook his head. “We can talk and ask questions and make plans, but the simple fact is that this idea of space piracy is nothing short of insane. It will never work.”

  “1 agree,” said al Hashimi. “Nothing can come of it.”

  “It is rather like trying to bell the cat,” Chalons said.

  “I wouldn’t want to be the one to try to hijack a Soviet ore freighter,” al Hashimi confessed. “I can see myself rotting in the Gulag mines on the Moon.”

  Chalons nodded vigorously.

  With a deep chuckle, Kolwezi said to Dan, “It’s a bold scheme, but I don’t see how it could ever be successful.”

  Vavuniya’s eyes flicked from one man’s face to another’s. Finally he agreed sadly, “I suppose they are right. It could never come to be.”

  Dan was silent for several minutes. Then he shrugged wearily. “Okay. Maybe you’re right.”

  Nobo was staring at him, puzzled.

  “I’m certainly not going to try it if you’re not in the scheme with me,” Dan said.

  They all shifted uneasily in their chairs and avoided his gaze. After a few minutes more of desultory chat, the meeting broke up. One by one the men got to their feet, shook Dan’s hand and, expressing their regrets at being unable to agree with him, they left the apartment. Finally, no one was left except Nobo.

  The young Japanese slumped back into his chair at the end of the long marble table. The dirty dishes and crumbs of luncheon were still strewn across it.

  Dan grinned at him. “Don’t look so glum.”

  Nobo’s chin was on his chest. “I thought …”

  “You thought wrong,” Dan said.

  “They have no guts at all, do they? How did they ever get to the positions they’re in?”

  “By looking before they leaped,” Dan said, his grin widening.

  “What are you so happy about?”

  Dan said, “I want you to go back to your father and tell him what’s happened here today. The whole story. See if he�
�ll speak to his contacts in the Chinese government.”

  “But why? …”

  Sitting on the edge of the table and leaning toward his young friend, Dan said, “They bought the idea. Don’t you understand that? None of them is foolish enough to admit it, especially in front of witnesses. But they’re going to go ahead with it-as soon as I start the ball rolling by grabbing the first Russian freighter.”

  Nobo’s mouth dropped open.

  Dan laughed heartily. “Don’t you understand? They’re too cautious to say it out loud. In fact, if any of them did agree, 1 would have suspected that he’d run straight to the Russians and tell them everything.”

  “Then we’re going to do it?”

  “I’m going to do it,” Dan said firmly. “You’re getting the hell out of here and back to Japan, where you’ll be safe.”

  “No! I want to-”

  Dan gripped his shoulder. “I can’t take the risk with my oldest friend’s son, Nobo. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. The best help you can give me right now is to get back to your father.”

  Nobo said nothing.

  “That’s the way it’s got to be,” Dan said softly.

  Finally, Nobo nodded, his face bleak. He got up to leave after a few more moments. Dan walked him to the apartment door. After shutting it behind him, Dan muttered to himself:

  “He’ll be safe in Japan, with his father.” Then he heard himself add, “And he’ll be ten thousand miles away from Lucita.”

  Chapter TWENTY-SIX

  As he watched the space station Nueva Venezuela slowly turning, like a set of brilliant white wheels nested one within another, hanging against the eternal dark of space, Dan realized all over again what a desperately mad scheme this was.

  Piracy. In space. It was enough to make him laugh out loud-almost. The men who sat jammed into the flitter’s cramped cockpit with him probably were nervous enough without him suddenly cackling like a lunatic. So Dan held himself in control. But it was madness; they were all insane and he was the craziest of the lot and he knew it.

  Then the space station turned far enough for him to see the red, blue and gold flag painted on its flank, and he remembered the method behind his insanity. Shifting in his seat as much as the harness would allow, Dan turned his head to look at the glowing mass of the Earth, so big that it filled the sky with its brilliant blue beauty and swirling bands of pure white clouds. He could make out the coast of California and the Baja, the rugged folds of the Sierras, the wrinkled browns and reds of the deserts that stretched beyond the mountains.

  The Earth turned, and the flitter glided deeper into space.

  The American coast slid away from his view and there was nothing to be seen but the vast expanse of the Pacific, glittering under the sun. Polynesians had crossed that huge ocean in open outriggers, Dan knew, voyages that made modern sojourns in space look easy and safe.

  It was a happy coincidence that the flitters, designed to ferry men and equipment from one orbital facility to another, were built like long thin broomsticks. Usually they were loaded down with bulky cargo pods, like donkeys carrying oversized loads. But their basic needlelike shape gave them a low radar profile; if they were not saddled with bulging burdens, they were hard to spot on a radar screen.

  Three other men sat wedged into the flitter’s narrow cockpit. Carstairs, the irreverent, irrepressible Australian, was at Dan’s left, piloting the flitter. The Venezuelan kid, Vargas, and a quiet, tight-lipped former Israeli, Zlotnik, sat in the two rear seats. They all wore silvered pressure suits and helmets; there was no room inside the cockpit’s bubble canopy to squirm into the suits, nor was the cockpit pressurized. Without cargo pods, the flitter was little more than a slim needle bearing small thrusters at one end, the cockpit at the other and a latticework of titanium girders holding the two together.

  With a small shake of his head, Dan turned his eyes away from the hypnotic glory of Earth and focused his attention on the task ahead. The Soviet ore freighter was little more than four hours away. Was it truly unguarded, undefended? Or did the Soviets already know about this wild plan to hijack it? Has somebody told them about it? Is Malik sitting there like a spider in the middle of his web, Dan wondered, just waiting for me to step into his trap?

  They would love that, Dan thought. Billionaire American capitalist caught in the act of piracy. They’d stage a big trial, get the biggest crowds since the French Revolution. They’d hang me on worldwide television; I’d get the highest ratings ever.

  Then he grinned to himself. They’ll have to catch me first.

  “Injection burn.” Dan heard Carstairs’ voice in his helmet earphones as the rawboned Aussie flicked his gloved fingers across the flitter’s control panel. The slightest feathery touch of thrust nudged Dan gently against the padded back of his seat. A cold puff of nitrogen gas was being squirted out of the thruster nozzles, pushing the spacecraft into an orbit that exactly matched the path of the Soviet ore freighter.

  Dan glanced down at the radar display screen. There was the freighter, a fat dumb blip in the middle of the orange-glowing screen. Computer numbers flickered along the edge of the screen, telling him exactly how far away the freighter was and how long it would take to make the rendezvous with it. Dan started to scratch at an itch on his nose, but his hand bumped the visor of his helmet. He laughed at himself. We’re actually going to board that craft and steal its cargo. We’re going to be pirates. Yo-ho-ho and all that!

  “No escorting spacecraft,” said Vargas’ soft, youthful voice. Just a touch of tightness in it, Dan realized. Just a bit of nerves.

  “Can’t tell if it’s crewed from this distance,” Zlotnik muttered.

  “We’ll get a computer-enhanced image in an hour or so,” Dan said, keeping his voice light and easy. “Nothing to do until then, so relax.”

  “Sure, boss. And what do we do if the enhanced picture shows a crew pod on the freighter?”

  With a laugh, Dan answered, “We wave to them as we go past, then turn around and head for home.”

  “They won’t have any bloody crew aboard,” Carstairs said. “Fuckin’ Russkies aren’t that daft, puttin’ crews aboard fryters with nothin’ t’do but jerk themselves off for two bloody weeks at a tyme. We’re the only madmen in this part of the universe.”

  Dan heard the others chuckle at the Aussie’s evaluation of the situation. But he’s right, Dan thought. We’re the only madmen in this part of the universe. The others, al Hashimi, Vavuniya and the rest, were waiting to see how this first attempt came out. Nobuhiko and his father were sitting safely in Tokyo, surrounded by loyal retainers who would literally put their own bodies between the Yamagatas and any assassin. And Dan’s attempt to win at least a tacit understanding from Jane Scanwell had crashed miserably.

  He had realized when the other space industrialists had sat down with him that they would inevitably expect him to gain at least the covert support of the United States. Old habits die hard, and although al Hashimi might sneer at the States openly, even he still half expected some show of resistance from Washington against the Soviets.

  And so did I, Dan realized. So did I.

  To his surprise, Jane had agreed to see him much more easily than the last time, several months earlier. The American President still would not risk being seen publicly with the expatriate billionaire, but she was willing to spirit him into the White House for a quick, clandestine meeting.

  Dan had flown to New York and taken the ancient, crowded, filthy train from La Guardia to Penn Station. Teams of fully armed policemen in helmets and riot armor stood menacingly at each end of every car, glittery-eyed attack dogs beside them. The train was noisy and reeked of sweat and urine. People were jammed in shoulder to shoulder as it lurched and swayed and roared along the elevated tracks. Peering past the shoulders of blank-faced riders who clung to the handbars like immobilized chimpanzees, Dan saw that vast areas of Queens had been burned out, the buildings blackened and hollow, their windows gaping emptily. The Rus
sians didn’t have to bomb New York, he thought grimly. The city is self-destructing.

  As the train crossed the sewage-choked stench of the East River on the Queensboro Bridge, Dan got a glimpse of Manhattan: the FDR Drive was practically empty except for armored Army personnel carriers and dilapidated city buses; the midtown towers were grimy with soot from the coal-burning power plants; the UN buildings, abandoned for several years now, looked dirty and uncared-for. Then the train plunged into the subway tunnel with a deafening roar.

  At Penn Station, Dan saw that New York had finally produced a modicum of public safety and solved a large part of its unemployment problem at the same time. Police were everywhere, in teams of two or three, armed like strike force commandos with everything from snub-barreled shotguns to gas grenades. And Dan quickly learned how the bankrupt city paid its swollen police force. There were toll desks at the entrance to Penn Station: to get in, Dan had to stand in line for ten minutes and then pay a twenty-dollar admission toll. The policewoman at the desk also checked his passport there. Every person in line had to show some form of identification. Dan noted that the policewoman was just as heavily armed as the men who stood behind her.

  Even so protected, Penn Station still had hustlers and thieves prowling through its underground mall. Dan was approached by half a dozen panhandlers within fifty feet of the entrance. He plowed past them, clutching his travel bag closely, but then he felt a hand brushing against his side. He grabbed at it, and found himself squeezing the thin wrist of a frightened, skinny, freckle-faced redheaded kid who could not have been more than ten years old.

  “That’s my pocket you’re reaching into,” Dan said quietly, not breaking his stride, yanking the boy alongside him.

  The kid said nothing. His eyes were wide with fright.

  Dan glanced around, looking for others who might be accomplices. “Do you want to go to jail?” he asked the kid.

  “Please, mister … please lemme go.”

  A black policeman was watching them, Dan saw, holding a mean-looking electric truncheon and tapping it menacingly into his open palm.