Privateers

by Ben Bova

  “They wouldn’t dare! That would be an act of war!”

  Trying to keep himself from sneering at the former general, Hernandez said, “Would we declare war on the Soviet Union?”

  The Defense Minister turned toward the President, who still stood behind his huge, curved desk.

  “That is out of the question,” the President said, shaking his head hard enough to make his jowls quiver. “Out of the question.”

  “Then what can we do?”

  “We can send Moscow a formal protest,” said the Foreign Minister, “and ask for an emergency session of the General Assembly to consider this matter. After all, that is Venezuelan national territory they have invaded. It is just the same as if they had landed an army on our own soil.”

  “We must not allow our emotions to blind us to the facts,” Hernandez countered. “The Soviets are not invading our country. They are searching the space station for the pirates who have been stealing their ore shipments.”

  “Why did they pick Nueva Venezuela?” demanded the Minister of Trade. “Why not attack the Indian space station, or one of the Japanese?”

  “Because they suspect the American, Randolph, to be the leader of the pirates,” Hernandez said.

  “How could they believe that?”

  “Because it is true.”

  “Nonsense! Impossible! Why would the Yankee billionaire stoop to such a thing?”

  The others began to chime in and the room filled with a dozen separate clamoring voices once more. The President waved his hands and banged on the desktop again, in vain. But then the phone on his desk buzzed softly, and every voice instantly went quiet.

  In the sudden stillness, the President picked up the handpiece: “Yes?”

  The others stared at him, trying to decipher what he was hearing from the expression on his face.

  “Very well,” said the President. “Send him in.”

  Hernandez turned to the leather-covered door. It was swung open by a tall, stern-faced military policeman in a polished steel helmet and spotless uniform. He held the door wide, and a small, wiry Japanese dressed in baggy blue coveralls stepped into the office. He was young, but his face looked haggard, strained. Still, there was a crackle of energy about him, an air of determined purposefulness.

  He walked quickly across the smoke-filled room to the President’s desk. There he bowed from the waist, arms clamped to his sides.

  “I am Nobuhiko Yamagata, Senor Presidente. I thank you most humbly for granting me this opportunity to speak with you.”

  Hernandez was surprised at the quality of the man’s Spanish.

  “Seńor Yamagata,” responded the President, “I understand that you were aboard Nueva Venezuela when the Soviet troops seized it, and that you captured one of the Russian shuttles and rescued several of our citizens.”

  Nobo dipped his head in a brief bow of acknowledgment. “I did not act alone. I was helped by a team of my countrymen.”

  “You stole a Russian ship?” gasped the Minister of Trade.

  “And captured eight Soviet soldiers. They are in custody at the Astro launching center.” Nobo reached inside his coveralls and pulled out a Russian machine pistol. A murmur of shocked surprise wafted through the room. He placed the gun carefully on the President’s desk; it looked grim and deadly.

  “We are trying to decide what must be done,” the President said, almost in a whisper.

  “The Russians will kill all those whom they believe oppose them. They have already killed a dozen unarmed astronauts, several of whom were native citizens of Venezuela.”

  “What?”

  “My duty,” Nobo went on, ignoring their frightened, questioning faces, “is to return to Nueva Venezuela and try to help rescue the others from the Soviet troops.”

  “We have prohibited all space launchings,” Hernandez said.

  “Precisely why I am here,” Nobo countered. “That prohibition must be lifted, or many more citizens of Venezuela and other countries will be slaughtered by the Russians.”

  “I find that difficult to accept,” said Hernandez.

  The young Japanese turned to face him directly. “Sir, your daughter is there. Her life is in as much danger as the life of Dan Randolph.”

  Hernandez felt his knees buckle. “My … Lucita?”

  “Yes,” said Nobuhiko. “If we do not act swiftly, she will be killed along with all the others.”

  Chapter THIRTY-EIGHT

  Zachary Freiberg’s face looked drawn and grim in the small screen. He’s aged since he’s come to Astro, Dan thought. Then, correcting himself, No, he’s matured.

  The scientist was in his office in Caracas. Dan was still at the communications console in the space factory, his legs unconsciously wrapped around the pedestal of his chair to keep him anchored in the zero gravity. The Russians were jamming all radio frequencies, but Dan could talk to his Astro headquarters by laser, linked by a pencil-thin beam of light as long as the factory was above Caracas’ horizon.

  “They’re on a high-energy burn,” Freiberg was saying. “It’ll be a week before they reach the asteroid.”

  “They’ve got to be stopped,” Dan insisted.

  “How, for God’s sake?” Freiberg snapped. “The Venezuelan government has forbidden all launches. Rumors are flying around here that if we try to launch anyway, the goddamned Russians will shoot us down with the lasers from their antimissile satellites.”

  Dan glanced at the clock digits ticking off in the lower right corner of the screen. Only a few more seconds before the factory’s orbit carried it out of range of Caracas.

  “Even if we could launch a team after them,” Freiberg was saying, “they’d have to go at such high gees that they’d all have hernias or hemorrhoids by the time they caught up with the Russians.”

  “You’ve got to do something, Zach. It’s up to you. I’m depending on you. The whole country’s depending on you. That fucking piece of rock is going to wipe out a helluva lot of the Middle West. Millions could be killed.”

  “I know. The computer projections-”

  “Then do something! Get on the horn with President Scanwell and make her see that she’s got to act!”

  “I’ll try,” Freiberg promised. “I’ll try my best.”

  The picture in the display screen suddenly wavered wildly, then broke up. The screen went blank.

  Dan leaned back in his seat, exhausted, drained physically and emotionally. In the faint reflection of the darkened display screen he saw his own face: haggard, hollow-eyed, unshaved, his hair matted and tangled. He suddenly realized that Lucita was gone; he was alone in the cramped little cubicle of the communications center. Before he could think of what to do, the door swung open and she entered, stepping carefully in her Velcro slippers, carrying a small tray laden with plastic containers.

  “I could not find much in the galley,” she said. “Only some soup and something that was labeled soyburgers, whatever they are.”

  He smiled weakly at her. “I don’t feel hungry. …”

  “You will eat,” Lucita said, fastening the tray onto the console desktop in front of him. “To keep up your strength you must eat.”

  He took the cover off a plastic bowl: the hot soup hung in a perfect weightless sphere, surrounded by a faint mist of steam. The aroma made Dan suddenly ravenous. He jammed the cover back onto the bowl and put its spout to his lips. The soup felt burning hot and invigorating.

  For several minutes he ate and drank, saying nothing. Finally:

  “I’ve done everything I can,” he said to Lucita.

  She nodded.

  “There’s only one other thing I can think of,” he added.

  “What is that?”

  “We can put you back into a suit and send you back to Nueva Venezuela. Malik doesn’t want to hurt you. You could get out of this.”

  “Not without you,” Lucita said.

  “I could surrender to him,” Dan pointed out. “He won’t kill me. He’d rather put me on trial in
Moscow, put on a big show.” He made himself grin at her. “It would be a big help to have you testify in my defense. You could be my character witness and tell them all what a great guy I am.”

  She did not smile back. “He will kill you as soon as he can.”

  Before Dan could say anything more, someone tapped at the door.

  “What is it?” Dan called out.

  The door opened wide enough for a man to stick his head in. It was Kaktins, the scarecrow-lean Latvian with the wild hair. His long, lantern-jawed face was somber.

  “They are coming,” Kaktins reported. “The shuttle that was at the loading dock has disconnected and is coasting this way.”

  Dan pushed himself to his feet, automatically letting his slippers grip the Velcro carpeting. “It’s filled with their troops, no doubt.”

  “No doubt,” Kaktins agreed.

  With Lucita trailing behind him, Dan trudged down the long tubular corridor that led to the factory’s main airlock.

  “They must have left some troops aboard the station,” he mused aloud, “to keep it in their grip.”

  Kaktins nodded vigorously enough to make his whole body bounce weightlessly. “Can’t be more than twenty soldiers coming over here. Thirty, maybe.”

  “And how many men do we have?”

  “Sixty-three technicians and machine operators in factory,” said Kaktins. “Nineteen are women. Not counting you and the lady.”

  Dan turned slightly toward Lucita. In the flat shadowless lighting of the metal-walled tunnel she no longer looked like an elfin little waif. She was a woman, Dan realized, as brave and determined as any woman who chose to stand beside her man in the hour of mortal danger. Unsmiling, her dark eyes searching his, she seemed totally unafraid of whatever fate was approaching. And totally beautiful, desirable, a woman worth fighting for, worth risking everything for.

  “We have laser cutting tools,” Kaktins was saying. “Maybe they are clumsy to handle, but they could slice a man in half-like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “And slice through the factory’s walls while we’re at it,” Dan countered.

  “We could get them when they come in airlock.”

  “Yeah, we could kill some Russian kids in soldier suits. They’d just send more of them up here. In the end, we’d get every one of us killed.”

  “They kill us all anyway,” Kaktins said. “You think they let me go free?”

  “We’re not going to fight them,” Dan said firmly.

  “But-”

  “Not with lasers or pistols. Not the way they expect.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Without taking his eyes off Lucita, Dan told the Latvian, “We’ll try a strategy the Russians have used on invaders since the time of the Mongols. I don’t know if it’ll work, but it’s the only chance we have.”

  Willem Quistigaard took a deep breath of clean Alpine air as he stood at the top of the run. The wind had died down after blowing away the clouds. The sky sparkled freshly blue, and the snow beneath his skis felt good: dry powder, in perfect, unspoiled condition. The dismal gray rain of Paris had

  turned to new snow here in Switzerland. Being chairman of the International Astronautical Council had its benefits, the best of them being that he got preferential treatment at his favorite ski resorts. Later in the day this run would be filled with bureaucrats from other UN agencies who were taking the afternoon off, and clumsy tourists from Bulgaria and similar backwaters. But this morning it was all his.

  He lowered his goggles over his eyes, took in the spectacular Swiss scenery once more, then pushed off and headed down the clean, empty slope. He felt the bite of the cold wind in his face and the exhilarating, half-frightening thrill of racing down the mountainside. This must be something like the feeling they get in zero gravity, he thought as he bent forward into the wind. Perhaps one day I will let them take me up to one of the space stations and see what it’s like.

  They were waiting for him at the bottom of the slope. As he rushed along on the final leg of the run, he could see his responsibilities gathered down there. A long black limousine, several of his assistants standing by the car, looking as out of place here on the ski slopes in their fur-trimmed overcoats and homburgs as he would look in the IAC offices in his stretch pants and windbreaker.

  He braked to a stop in a swirl of powdery snow just a few meters from where they stood.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

  His chief secretary, a fellow Swede, tall, rawboned, as blond as a Norse god, crunched across the snow in his expensive Italian shoes.

  “All hell’s broken loose. The Soviets have seized Nueva Venezuela and apparently killed a dozen people.”

  “My God!”

  “They claim they were pirates, caught in the act.”

  “Of course. Why else would they do it?”

  “The Japanese government has asked for an immediate emergency meeting of the General Assembly. So has the United States.”

  “The Americans?” A tendril of fear crawled up Quistigaard’s spine, a fear he had not felt for more than a decade. The Americans claimed that they had dismantled all their nuclear bombs. The Russians claimed that they could shoot down any missiles fired at them. But was it all true? Could there be a nuclear war, now, after all these years of peace?

  “There’s more,” the secretary said. “We just received a protest from the government of Venezuela against the Soviet seizure of their space station. More protests have come in from several other Third World nations.”

  Quistigaard felt his hands trembling inside their gloves. “And the Chinese? What do they say?”

  “Nothing-as yet.”

  He leaned on his ski poles and felt his heart racing, pounding inside his chest. It is all Dan Randolph’s fault, Quistigaard told himself. Everything was going along peacefully until the damned American began to rock the boat. I hope the Russians find him and hang him from the Kremlin walls.

  But to his secretary he said, “Help me get these damned skis off. We have a thousand things to do and only a few hours in which to do them.”

  Chapter THIRTY-NINE

  One of the ungainly projecting arms of the space factory ended in a bulbous pod that housed a large industrial laser, a complex jumble of electrical power machinery and massive slabs of copper polished so finely that a giant could use them as shaving mirrors.

  Dan Randolph hung weightlessly amid the thick cables and long rows of capacitor banks. The laser pod was unlighted except for the glow of the gleaming Earth revolving below, huge and bright and so close that Dan felt he could almost touch it with his outstretched hand. Silhouetted against the Earth’s daylit blue was the bull’s-eye structure of Nueva Venezuela. And hanging between them, looming larger every second, was the approaching Soviet space shuttle.

  It looked very much like any nation’s shuttle, Dan thought, and for the totally pragmatic reason that they were all designed for the same task. Form follows function, and except for the red star painted on the shuttle’s raked-back tail fin, the aerospace craft might have been built in Japan or India or California.

  Dan looked at the gleaming aluminum column next to him before reaching for one of the handgrips set into it. Signs that warned DANGER-HIGH VOLTAGE were stenciled everywhere and he had no intention of frying himself before Malik arrived. He half climbed, half swam in the weightlessness of zero gravity until he was hovering alongside a short, swarthy, potbellied technician in the olive-green coveralls of a laser operator. The man smelled faintly of oil and sweat and something acrid that Dan could not identify. I imagine I must smell pretty much the same, Dan thought. The technician was bending intently over his control board, his short legs dangling in midair as he checked out the electrical circuitry. He grunted and nodded to himself as he clicked color-coded buttons across the length of the long panel.

  Holding on to one of the handgrips studding the edge of the control board, Dan nudged the technician.

  “E
verything ready?” he asked.

  The tech looked up, and Dan saw that he had the butt of an unlit cigar clamped in his teeth. “Sure. Ready to go. Checks out one hunnert percent.”

  Dan noticed a handful of fresh cigars in the tech’s chest pocket. “You don’t smoke those things in here, do you?”

  He broke into a ragged-toothed grin. “Don’t smoke ‘em at all. Useta. Smoked a dozen a day, years ago. But I made a bet with a guy-whole case of Glenlivet. Ain’t smoked one since then. Nobody says I can’t chew ‘em, though.”

  Dan was glad that his back was to the Earthlight and the tech probably could not see the expression on his face too clearly. Then he turned slightly and pointed toward the approaching shuttle.

  “See the tail cone, back at the end?”

  “Sure. Where the rocket nozzles poke out.”

  “All right,” said Dan. “I want you to make a cut just forward of those fairings that house the nozzles.”

  “I can saw ‘em right off for you.”

  Dan tapped him on the shoulder. “Just a deep slice will do. Just enough to cut the electrical connections between the thrusters and the cockpit, so they can’t move the bird once she’s docked with us.”

  “Gotcha. No sweat.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Coupla minutes.”

  “Fine. Wait until she’s docked. I’ll tell you when to start.”

  “Sure.” He reached across the control board, flipped open a protective covering and clicked on the master power switch. From somewhere deep in the bowels of the machinery, Dan heard a generator begin to whine.

  “That’s all you want me to do?” the technician asked.

  “That’ll be plenty,” said Dan.

  “I could saw that bird into jigsaw pieces at this range, you know. Cut ‘em up for good. They’d never know what hit ‘em.”

  “And then one of their antimissile lasers would do the same to us,” Dan said.

  The tech grunted as if he’d been hit in the solar plexus.

  “No,” Dan said. “I just want to cut off their retreat. The less bloodshed, the better.” Except for one particular Russian, he added silently.