Privateers

by Ben Bova

  “This has nothing to do with our personal feelings,” Dan said. “It’s strictly business, and it’s vital that I see her, soon. Before the week is out, if it can be arranged.”

  “Impossible!” Andrews flapped his free hand in the air.

  “I said it’s vital,” Dan repeated.

  “She can’t be seen with you, you know that.”

  “Then something clandestine has got to be arranged. Like tonight. Nobody knows I’m here except your butler and your security chief.”

  “And the KGB,” Lissa cracked.

  Dan laughed. “Still cleaning bugs out of the walls?”

  “The walls, the floors, the ceilings … we even found some in the books in here.”

  Andrews dismissed his wife’s candor with a shake of his head. “Dan, I am not going to ask that woman to find the time to see you.”

  “Not even as a favor to a fellow American?” Dan asked, grinning slightly.

  “You gave up your American citizenship when you moved your corporate headquarters here, remember?”

  “It wasn’t my idea! That silly law required it.”

  “Still, she won’t take the chance of being seen with you, and I’m not going to lower myself by asking her to.”

  Dan drained the last sips of his amontillado and put the tulip-shaped glass down on the coffee table in front of his chair.

  “All right, Quentin,” he said lightly. “I’ve gone through official channels and been turned down. Now I’ll contact her through unofficial channels. You had your chance; don’t say I didn’t come to you first.”

  He got to his feet, leaned down to peck Lissa’s cheek and strode out of the room.

  Chapter THIRTEEN

  The President of the United States felt close to crying.

  She was sitting at her usual place at the long, gleaming table in the Cabinet Room, flanked on her right by the Secretary of Agriculture, on her left by the Secretary of State. The other Cabinet officers were arrayed around the table, a neatly picked balance of whites, blacks and Hispanics, men and women.

  The Secretary of Agriculture, who once owned a chain of farm equipment dealerships in Nebraska and the Dakotas, was shaking his head mournfully. He had the round, slightly florid face of a born used-car salesman, but lately his optimistic smile and glib patter had been replaced by a somber, almost frightened look.

  “That’s the bottom line,” he said. “The Russians set the international prices for wheat and corn, and they’ve set them eight percent lower than last year.”

  The President lifted her chin a notch and held back the anger and frustration that was welling up inside her. For long moments no one around the table said a word. Through the French doors at her back, the President could hear a robin singing, out in the Rose Garden. She glanced up at the portrait of Franklin Roosevelt over the fireplace at the far end of the room.

  How I wish I had your boundless confidence, Jane Scanwell said silently to the jaunty FDR. Nothing to fear but fear itself: if only it was that simple.

  The Vice-President, sitting directly across the table from her, was scowling like the New England schoolteacher he had once been. He had been the Senate majority leader, and a power to be reckoned with. Once Jane had succeeded her husband, she had plucked this scrawny, severe, latter-day Daniel Webster out of the Senate and made him Vice-President, where he could do her no harm. She was beginning to realize, though, that he could no longer do her any good, either.

  “Eight percent lower,” the Vice-President muttered. “But they can’t-”

  “Yes they can,” Agriculture snapped. “The damned Commies set their price and the rest of the world market falls right into line with them.”

  The Secretary of Defense, once a post so important that he always sat at the President’s right hand, said from the foot of the table, “We could refuse to sell at that price. Hold back the grain until the price goes up a little.”

  Agriculture shook his head. “The other food exporting countries will undercut us … Argentina, Australia, Canada …”

  The President turned to the Secretary of State. Like most of the Cabinet officers, he had been her husband’s appointee; she had not replaced them with her own choices. Not yet.

  “Can we negotiate agreements with the other food exporters?” she asked.

  “Bilateral agreements with each individual nation?” he asked. He was a former Dallas banker, a slim, elegant Hispanic with distinguished silvery hair and deep brown eyes that had a strange, slightly oriental cast to them. Jane thought of him as a department store mannequin, a figure of wax that displays clothes well. She imagined that he slept in a three-piece pinstripe suit of gray or navy blue.

  “1 was thinking,” she replied, “more of a multilateral situation, sort of the kind that the oil-producing nations had back in the seventies.”

  “You mean OPEC?”

  “Yes, that’s it. An OPEC for the nations that export food.”

  He pursed his lips, as if seriously considering the idea for a moment, then said flatly, “The Russians would never allow it.”

  “You don’t think …”

  He gave the President a patient little smile. “The men in the Kremlin would never permit anything that interfered with their ability to set the world price for grain and other foodstuffs. To think we could get around that in some way is idle dreaming.”

  You condescending little prick, the President raged inwardly. It’s smug little bastards like you who got us into this mess in the first place.

  The Treasury Secretary looked up from the pocket computer he had been fiddling with. “An eight percent drop in the price we get for food exports is going to mean a significant increase in unemployment.”

  The President leaned back in her chair and let them take up that theme. They don’t understand, she told herself. They can’t see far enough to understand. If we can hold out, if we can just hang on for long enough, we’ll win. In the long run we can win-if we don’t destroy ourselves first. While the Cabinet officers argued hotly over just what percentage of the nation’s work force would be laid off, and what this would mean to the national economy and the value of the deflated dollar overseas, and to her chances for reelection in November, she let her mind drift to the message she had received that morning.

  I knew he’d come crawling back, Jane Scanwell told herself. It’s taken more than three years, but he’s finally begging to see me.

  Maybe begging is too strong a word, she warned herself. Dan Hamilton never begs. He’s too proud to bend his knees. But he wants to see me. He needs my help.

  Cold anger seeped along her veins like a river of ice engulfing her. He needs my help, she repeated, savoring the thought. When I needed his help he ran away, left the country, left Morgan to die and me to carry on alone. Now he wants to come back, to be forgiven.

  Never, she told herself. I’ll see him burn in hell before I lift a finger to help him. I’ll see the Russians hang him in Red Square first.

  Dan Randolph hovered weightlessly, his boots a good four inches off the “floor” of the locker room, as the two technicians checked out his space suit. His helmet floated before him within easy reach, turning and drifting ever so slightly, like a severed head slowly turning its face away from him.

  It’s been months since I’ve been up here, Dan realized. I shouldn’t let so much time pass between visits.

  It had surprised him that he had felt slightly queasy for the first few hours in zero gravity. After all the hundreds of times he had flown into orbit, he thought he had left the butterflies of zero-gee far behind. That’s what you get for staying on the ground too long, he told himself. It’s your punishment for sticking in the mud instead of being up here where you belong.

  In the few hours since his shuttle had docked at the space station the uneasy malaise gradually disappeared, to be replaced by the euphoria and pleasure of weightlessness. Dan felt as if he had left all the cares of Earth far behind him; he was in a new world now, in his own element, f
ree and happy.

  “Can’t you guys go any faster?” he complained.

  The chief technician, a toothsome blonde with a healthy tan and the confident smile of a woman who knew her business, gave him a disarming smile.

  “Mr. Randolph, sir,” she said, “we’re responsible for your safety. We don’t want the Big Boss to get killed because we missed a pinhole leak in his space suit, now do we?”

  “We don’t want the Big Boss to die of old age before he gets out the airlock, either,” Dan jabbed back.

  She laughed. “We’re careful, boss, not slow.”

  He grumbled and muttered good-naturedly as they completed their check of his suit, its radio, its life-support backpack and the jet maneuvering unit that embraced him like the back and two arms of a chair that had no seat or legs.

  At last Dan put on his helmet, sealed the collar and slid the visor down and locked it in place.

  The crew chief flashed him a toothy grin and said, “You are cleared for EVA, sir.”

  Dan barely heard her from inside the helmet, but he had learned to read lips years ago. He floated over to the inner airlock hatch and entered the round metal chamber. Airlocks always reminded Dan of stainless-steel wombs. This one was bigger than most, large enough to accommodate half a dozen astronauts at once or a fair amount of bulky equipment. Its metal walls were dulled by years of scratching and scuffing, but the labels on the inner and outer control panels had been freshly sprayed on: Dan could read them clearly.

  He knew them by heart, of course. The technicians inside the space station were monitoring the airlock; automatic failsafe systems would not allow a neophyte to kill himself by opening the hatches in the wrong order. It was a common understanding among the men and women who worked in space that a person who was careless enough to get killed probably deserved it; but the sloppy sonofabitch usually took somebody else with him, sometimes more than one other person. An airlock accident could wipe out everybody on the other side of the inner hatch, so both human and machine monitors watched the airlocks constantly.

  The air pumped out of the metal womb and the control panel light next to the outer hatch turned green. Dan drifted over to it and leaned a thumb against the glowing plastic button. The hatch swung open without a sound and Dan glided out into the emptiness of space, a newborn leaving the womb.

  For a breathless moment he hovered just outside the open hatch, reveling in the glory of it. The Earth revolved slowly, immense, filling half the sky, incredibly clean and glowing, purest blues and greens of the shining seas, swirls of dazzling white clouds that hid whole continents beneath their vast expanse. Dan gazed at it, the home of the human race. It looked so serene and beautiful from this distance.

  It took a real effort of will to pull his attention away from the endlessly fascinating world that lay before him, and focus on the factory that hung less than five kilometers away.

  It was an ungainly, almost ugly collection of metal pods, cylinders, connecting tubes, crisscrossing beams and big paddle-shaped solar collectors that stretched their arms out to the unfiltered sunlight like the dark rectangular leaves of some alien extraterrestrial tree, drinking in solar energy and converting it silently, efficiently, to the electricity that the factory needed.

  In a way, the factory reminded Dan of an old typesetting machine that he had once seen in an ancient printing shop back in rural Virginia, when he had been a child; a clinking, clanking collection of moving mechanical arms and vats of molten lead.

  The heart of the space factory was the smelter, where ores from the Moon were refined into pure elements: aluminum, titanium, silicon, oxygen. The factory itself had been built mostly of lunar metals. Now part of the factory made alloys that could not be manufactured on Earth, alloys that were stronger yet lighter than any earthly metals could be, because they had been made in zero gravity, where the molten elements could mix perfectly. Other sections of the factory manufactured special plastics, crystals for electronic equipment, pharmaceutical products that cured diabetes and other hormonal diseases.

  But none of that interested Dan at the moment. Working the control studs on the arms of his jetpack, he made his way from the slowly rotating wheels of the space station toward the graceless utilitarian clutter of the factory. As he approached it, Dan could see several shuttles hovering at the factory’s loading docks, taking on cargo for return to Earth. Space-suited astronauts scurried back and forth around the shuttles like silvery ants busily working at their tasks.

  Dan identified himself to the traffic controller at the factory’s monitoring center and heard her calm, sure voice in his helmet earphones, acknowledging his call and giving him clearance to approach. He jetted past the loading docks, through the maze of interconnected struts and beams that linked the factory’s various components together, and headed straight toward the odd collection of shapes that floated a few hundred meters beyond the factory’s outstretched solar panels.

  The asteroid ship was taking shape out there. It was a weird-looking assemblage of parts: a bulbous metal egg that housed the crew’s living quarters, a collection of propellant tanks that would be filled with nothing more than water, plastic pods for holding tools and equipment, and a small oblong metal box, about the size and shape of an oversized coffin, which contained the nuclear power plant that delivered the electricity for the spacecraft and its propulsion thrusters. The various modules of the craft were painted gleaming white, except for the lead-shielded nuclear power plant, which had been daubed blood red.

  “Dolphin One,” Dan called into his helmet microphone. “Dan Randolph coming aboard.”

  “Welcome aboard, Mr. Randolph.” He heard the voice of Nobuhiko Yamagata, clear and strong, in his earphones.

  The spacecraft looked anything but like a sleek dolphin. Its name came from the fact that the dolphin was one of the disguises of the Greek god Apollo, and the mission of this ship was to intercept one of the small asteroids that passed relatively near Earth in its orbit-the astronomers called such pieces of rock the Apollo class of asteroids.

  Dan expertly throttled his braking thrusters to kill his forward velocity. He reached the crew pod’s curving hull with a feather-light touch, worked the push-button controls to open the hatch and pulled himself inside. Once he had cycled through the airlock and stepped through the inner hatch, there was a technician waiting to help him out of the cumbersome space suit. Clad in white coveralls that were unmarked except for his last name stenciled over the left breast pocket, Dan made his way through the pod’s central corridor in the easy swimming motion of zero gravity.

  Nobo was sitting in the engineer’s station, a clipboard thick with papers floating at his left elbow as he checked out the intricate panels of indicator lights and switches.

  He dipped his head in an informal version of a respectful bow. “It’s an honor to have you aboard, sir.”

  Dan automatically nodded back. “How’s it going? How’s the reactor behaving?”

  “We haven’t run it up to full power yet.”

  “I know. Your report last night said there was a glitch with the control system.”

  “Ah. That is why you’ve come here.”

  “I don’t like troubles with something as important as the main power plant. Especially a nuke.”

  Nobo smiled. “You Americans have still not overcome your fear of nuclear power, have you?”

  The smile and the tone of voice appeared overly tolerant, almost condescending. Dan replied, “We’re not as fatalistic as you Japanese.”

  “It isn’t fatalism, it’s a matter of national survival. Hiroshima was a long time ago. We have learned to live with nuclear reactors. We had to. Especially since the Russians started marking up the price of oil and natural gas.”

  It was an argument Dan had played out with Saito Yamagata many times over the years. Japan had decided to go heavily into nuclear power rather than buy either Russian oil and natural gas or American coal. Despite the very real fears of accidents and radiation, the
Japanese had opted for nuclear-and won. Their electrical power systems were the best and safest in the world, and with the extra power they received from their solar power satellites, even their automobiles were electrically powered. The air quality in Tokyo and every other Japanese city was unmarred by the carcinogenic smog that came from burning fossil fuels.

  “So what’s wrong with the reactor?” Dan asked.

  Nobuhiko gave him another tolerant smile. “Nothing, really. It’s a good piece of Japanese technology. But the control rods were manufactured by a Swiss contractor. They passed inspection in Kyoto and actually they performed within specified limits in yesterday’s test. But barely within the limits.”

  Dan ran a hand across his chin. Nobo had won the assignment to be flight engineer for the asteroid mission. He had worked hard over the past two months and shown more intelligence, drive and dedication than even Dan could have hoped for. The job was his. And the responsibility. But Dan had to give him the power to make and enforce decisions, too. That went with the responsibility. If Nobo said the reactor system was no go, the mission was postponed. Or perhaps canceled altogether.

  “I contacted the manufacturer last night-”

  “Not from up here!”

  “No, no.” Nobo raised a placating hand. “I did not compromise our security. I placed a call from Nueva Venezuela to Caracas, which was relayed to Kyoto, and from there to Bern. As far as the Swiss know, their control system is being tested on an experimental reactor at the Yamagata Research Institute in the University of Kyoto.”

  Dan let out a long breath. “Okay. The Russians are suspicious enough already. Security is important.”

  “I understand.” Nobo jabbed a stubby finger at a green light glowing steadily in the upper right quadrant of the big monitoring board. “The control system is now working within the limits that I have set. The problem was very minor; just a small adjustment was necessary.”

  Dan gave him a happy grin. In the eight weeks he had been working for Astro Manufacturing, the young Yamagata had earned himself something of a reputation7 for insisting on well-nigh perfect performance from every piece of equipment he touched. The technicians joked that there were three sets of specifications for all the equipment delivered for the asteroid mission: the manufacturer’s original specs, the natural limits that God set on how well the equipment could work and the performance that Nobuhiko Yamagata demanded from the equipment. Of the three, Nobo’s was the most severe. “Yamagata’s tougher than God,” the technicians said. Not all of them were happy about Nobo’s lofty standards, but they all respected him for it.