Privateers

by Ben Bova

  There was one other person in the darkened office with him, a small, lean, nervous man of about forty, balding, with a pencil-thin mustache and the long slim fingers of a born pianist. He wore a gray suit. His blue tie was carefully knotted and his collar tightly buttoned. An American cigarette dangled from the coiner of his thin lips, and he squinted against the rising smoke as he peered at the computer screen on Malik’s desk.

  Malik, wearing a comfortable, loose-fitting peasant’s blouse over his expensive blue jeans, took a cigarette of his own from the cedarwood box on his desk and fitted it to his ivory holder as he said:

  “Where the two lines intersect, Lermentov. That’s the freighter that they’re after.”

  Lermentov was the KGB officer assigned to Malik. When the chief of the space program traveled outside his office, Lermentov was his chauffeur, or sometimes his valet. But he was always, in reality, Malik’s bodyguard and watchdog-and an unbreakable link that connected directly with the Minister for State Security.

  He stared at the graph lines on the glowing computer screen. “How can you be sure?”

  Malik lit his cigarette and savored it for a moment before answering. “According to the tape we received from Caracas an hour ago, the Yankee capitalist has already sent out a team of pirates. They left yesterday and are expected back tomorrow. Our radar surveillance of Nueva Venezuela fixed the time of departure of four of their small ships-that’s this point here.” He tapped the screen with his index fingernail.

  “1 see,” Lermentov replied.

  “Their ships are too small to track with radar for very great distances,” Malik resumed, “but the very fact that four of them together sailed out of radar range is proof enough for me. There’s only one ore freighter that they can reach soon enough to be back by tomorrow.” He tapped the screen again. “This one.”

  “Then that will be your Trojan Horse.”

  “Exactly.” Malik reached for the phone on his desktop. “We must get a team of soldiers to that freighter tonight.”

  “Can you get them there in time?” “It will take a high-energy launch from the Northern Cosmodrome in Plesetsk, but I’ve had the troops and a launching crew standing by for more than a week. They’ll get there in time. There may be a few bloody noses from the launch acceleration, but they’ll make it in time.”

  He spoke urgently into the phone, then hooked it into the receptacle on the side of the computer. Data flowed automatically to Plesetsk in an inhumanly rapid series of high-pitched beeps and squeaks. To Malik it sounded like dolphins conversing.

  Lermentov leaned back in his chair. “Won’t the pirates see your soldiers coming up to the freighter and be frightened away?”

  With a self-satisfied smile, Malik answered, “The pirates have been very clever about foiling our radars, using electronic countermeasures to make themselves virtually invisible to us. Well, two can play at that game. They won’t see the troops, I promise you. To them, the freighter will look totally innocent and unprotected.”

  The KGB officer nodded, apparently content.

  “By this time tomorrow, Dan Randolph will be on his way to Moscow, in fetters. And the space station Nueva Venezuela will be in our hands. Within a week we will be occupying all the so-called Third World space stations and rounding up all their piratical crews.”

  “The committee will be very pleased with you.”

  “I should hope so.” Malik thought about breaking out the vodka, but he remembered that this apostle of state security did not drink. Time to celebrate later, after the victory is actually in our grasp, he thought.

  “You’ve been skating on thin ice, these past few weeks,” Lermentov said. “People were starting to worry about your future.”

  “I’ve been playing for high stakes,” Malik shot back. “This has been more than an annoying series of raids, you know. From the very beginning I knew that I had to eliminate the last vestiges of the capitalists in space. It wasn’t enough to drive the United States government out of space. The capitalists like Randolph simply went elsewhere. …”

  “Like cockroaches scuttling away from the fumigator.”

  Malik laughed. “You should have been a poet. But you’re right. Now we can round up all of them, take over their orbital factories, and eliminate the last shreds of capitalism from space.”

  “And from Earth,” Lermentov added.

  “Ah, yes. From Earth too, eventually,” Malik agreed.

  Lermentov puffed happily on his cigarette.

  “There is one additional thing to be done,” Malik said, “and 1 need your help in doing it.”

  “What is that?”

  “I need four hydrogen bombs.”

  “What?”

  Raising a hand to placate the man’s sudden shock, Malik said, “Not military weapons. The kind that are used in big construction jobs, like reversing the course of the Lena River.”

  “Whatever do you need them for?”

  Malik was enjoying Lermentov’s obvious surprise and worry. “You know that the American altered the course of an asteroida big chunk of rock and metal.”

  “Yes. It will move into an orbit around the Earth, won’t it?”

  “If we leave it alone, it will.”

  The KGB man’s face seemed to pull itself into a wrinkled frown of curiosity and fear.

  “I plan to send a special team of cosmonauts to that asteroid and use the hydrogen bombs to alter its course still further-so that it will plunge into the Earth.”

  “By all the saints!”

  “We will drop it into the American Midwest somewhere. We can’t guide it too precisely, of course. But imagine the impact of a few million tons of rock on one of those midwestern American states such as Kansas or Missouri.”

  Lermentov seemed to be having trouble catching his breath. “It would belike … like …”

  “Like a hundred hydrogen bombs hitting them, all at once. Like the hand of God smiting them.”

  “A disaster. …”

  “A calamity,” Malik agreed. “Of course, there would be no radiation, no fallout. The calamity would not harm any other nation.”

  “But why? …”

  Reaching across his desk to stub out his cigarette, Malik said, “What better way to convince the world that Dan Randolph and all his capitalist ilk should be rounded up and hanged? He will get blamed for the disaster, of course. It will be the final nail in his coffin.”

  Chapter THIRTY-THREE

  Nobo had thought it would be difficult to arrange an unscheduled flight to Nueva Venezuela on such short notice, especially when his call to Dan resulted in the phone computer telling him that Mr. Randolph was asleep and not to be disturbed except for an emergency.

  Sitting in an office at the launch complex, with Lucita perched on a plastic chair watching him, Nobo debated waking Dan. The room was a Spartan, utilitarian office shared by temporary workers, little more than a desk, a computer terminal and a hook on the back of the door to hang a coat. It was frigidly air-conditioned; Americans were not satisfied with air conditioning until it made one’s sinuses ache, Nobuhiko thought. Lucita seemed chilled; she sat with her arms wrapped around herself, even though she had changed into a pair of jeans and a sensible, comfortable long-sleeved blouse, at Nobo’s suggestion. Skirts and dresses that looked fine on Earth were out of place aboard a space station, especially in the zero gravity areas, he had reminded her.

  On an impulse, he put through a call to Zach Freiberg, at the Astro offices in Caracas. The scientist listened to Nobo’s worries about Dan, then agreed to arrange for a shuttle to take him and Lucita to the space station.

  “Give me a half hour to talk to the chief of operations out there,” Freiberg said. “I’ve found that once you convince him to go to the expense of flying a shuttle up to the station, he fills it up with all the people who’ve been pestering him for the past week for an extra flight.”

  So it was arranged. From the office window, Lucita watched as two van loads of technicians r
ode out to one of the three double-decker aerospace planes parked in a silent, waiting row across the field. Like inquisitive ants they crawled around the huge craft, and then climbed up a ladder and disappeared inside it. She turned to check the digits of the clock on the bare metal desk, and saw that Nobo was watching her, his face a blank mask of Oriental patience. Slowly the ground crew fueled the massive lifter aircraft and its piggyback Orbiter. After nearly two hours had passed, a flight crew of three men and four women drove out to the ship and entered it. The minutes flicked by slowly. At last Lucita heard, even at this distance and through the triple-paned windows, the thundering whine of the lifter’s powerful jet engines. The double-decked craft trundled slowly from its parking place across the field to the loading ramp near the office building, with the Orbiter perched atop it.

  Forty-eight people, including Lucita and Nobo, walked through the boarding tunnel and took seats inside the Orbiter. It was an old ship, no longer used for the commercial flights that brought tourists to Nueva Venezuela, or even for the regularly scheduled cargo runs from the space factory. It was kept for emergencies, like this one.

  “I never realized that Dan had so many Japanese working for his company,” Lucita said as they took their seats.

  “Space construction is one of the most popular career choices in Japan,” Nobo replied. “There are many Japanese working in all the space facilities.”

  The interior of the shuttle was much like the interior of a well-worn airliner, except that there were no windows. Once, when this craft had been used to ferry tourists to Nueva Venezuela, there had been television screens set into the backs of the seats, so that the passengers could see views of the Earth and the station, or pre-recorded safety or entertainment tapes. Now the seat backs were blank. Employees had seen the views before, they needed no entertainment and they were required to know the safety regulations before making their first flight into space.

  The flight was uneventful, and the zero-gravity portion of it was so brief that Lucita did not have the time to worry about being sick. She rather enjoyed the feeling of weightlessness; it was like floating or, better yet. like the unearthly feeling she had gotten the first time she had smoked a whole marijuana cigarette all by herself, in the darkness of the cellar under her convent school dormitory.

  There were no stewards or stewardesses to help her once the Orbiter had docked at the space station’s zero-gravity hub. The other passengers, Astro employees or technicians of one kind or another, were expected to make their own way through the dock area and “down” the connecting tubes to the station’s living and working areas. Lucita, whose only previous experience in orbit had been aboard Kosmograd, allowed Nobo to take her hand and lead her gently to the tube hatch.

  At first it was like floating through a smooth metal-walled tunnel. It was brightly lit and there were plenty of other men and women, both ahead of them and behind. Lucita was glad she had changed into the slacks and blouse. Before long, Nobo guided her hands to the rungs of the ladder built into the tube’s wall, and within moments she was descending, step by step, with Nobo just below her and another Japanese, a stranger, a few rungs above.

  They reached the bottom of the tube at last, and Nobo held open the heavy metal hatch there. Lucita stepped through and into a beautifully furnished lounge area, richly carpeted, its curving walls decorated in warm reds and oranges and ochers. A single long window showed a slice of the gleaming blue-and-white Earth, so beautiful that most of the other visitors were drawn to the window, clustering there as if to a religious shrine.

  But Nobo was frowning. Lucita saw. “Why are we being detained here in the reception lounge?” he wondered aloud. “These are all Astro employees, not tourists. …”

  The far door to the lounge opened, and a short, thick-set man in a tan military uniform entered the lounge. He had a glistening leather holster strapped to his hip. Two grim-faced soldiers stood behind him, carrying machine pistols.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the officer in heavily accented English. “This facility is now under the control of the Soviet Union’s space forces. All regular activities have been suspended, pending the arrest and transportation of certain criminals whom we believe to be aboard this station. You will remain here until further notice. Stay calm and follow all orders given by Soviet authorities. Those who do not follow orders are subject to arrest. My troops have orders to shoot anyone who offers active resistance.”

  As he repeated the words in even worse Spanish, Lucita turned, white-faced with fear, to Nobuhiko.

  “Too late,” she whispered. “We are too late.”

  Major Igor Konstantinovich Ostrovsky always became ill in zero gravity. For the entire duration of the forty-minute flight from Kosmograd to Nueva Venezuela, he was sick as the proverbial dog. He sat in the frontmost seat in the passenger module of the spacecraft, his back to the thirty other Soviet soldiers of his command, so they could not see his ashen, agonized face or his knobby hands gripping the armrests so tightly that all the blood seemed squeezed out of them.

  In front of Major Ostrovsky was the blank bulkhead that separated the flight compartment from the passenger module. Ostrovsky stared at it. studying every scuff mark and scrape on the bare, worn metal. He held himself rigidly motionless. He felt as if he were falling, dropping endlessly into a long dark pit. His stomach was trying to crawl up his throat. If he turned his head even the slightest fraction of a millimeter, the whole world seemed to swim giddily and the nausea threatened to overwhelm him. So he sat as motionless as a dead and fossilized creature, trying to will himself into stony insensitivity.

  Behind him, over the whir of the air circulation fans and the incessant hum of electrical equipment, he could hear an occasional groan from his troops. They were all trained men, volunteers from the Strategic Rocket Corps’ own special soldiery, but still the queasiness of zero gravity got to some of them. They did not have the major’s iron self-discipline, however. Several of them used the retch bags that were part of their standard equipment. Each time one of them vomited, the noise made Ostrovsky’s guts churn. He tasted acrid bile in his throat, but he fought it down in silent, grim determination.

  Two Soviet spacecraft were approaching Nueva Venezuela, both under Ostrovsky’s command. Each carried thirty officers and men. Ostrovsky used his position as commander to make certain that his spacecraft got the assignment of docking at the emergency collar on the outermost rim of the Venezuelan space station. It meant some tricky maneuvering for the pilots, but the men in the spacecraft would immediately step into the part of the space station where gravity was normal. The other spacecraft was assigned to dock at the regular landing collar, at the zero-gee hub of the station.

  But every advantage comes only at a price. The spacecraft lurched and seemed to sway suddenly. Ostrovsky broke into a cold sweat and heard more gagging and moaning from the troops behind him. The pilots were jockeying the ship toward the station’s emergency dock, he knew, a difficult maneuver, especially when no assistance from the space station’s controllers had been asked for or given.

  They don’t realize that we’re going to board their station and take control of it, Ostrovsky told himself, hoping desperately that it was true. After this forty-minute bout with the nausea of weightlessness, neither he nor his troops were in any condition for a fight.

  With a surge that sent waves of queasiness through him, Ostrovsky felt weight returning. His stomach settled down to where it ought to be. His feet stuck to the floor and stopped trying to float away. He could turn his head without fearing that the world would turn itself upside down.

  “Docking maneuver complete,” he heard the captain-pilot’s voice announce over the intercom. “Hatch locked and sealed.”

  Gratefully, Ostrovsky unbuckled his seat harness and got to his feet. As he straightened his tan uniform, the squad sergeants bawled orders to the men and the two young, shaven-headed lieutenants-as alike as clones-made their way forward toward their commanding officer. Os
trovsky noted with perverse pleasure that they both looked as gray-faced and shaken as he felt.

  The soldiers, under the glaring eyes of their sergeants, scrambled up the ladder at the back end of the passenger module and through the overhead hatch that was now sealed tightly to one of the emergency hatches of the space station. They were under strict orders and knew their objectives. For two weeks they had rehearsed this operation. Ostrovsky had reported to Chairman Malik that his troops could seize Nueva Venezuela blindfolded. Malik had merely nodded and told him that they should keep their eyes open. Now he would show the chairman how well his troops could perform.

  Ostrovsky stayed aboard the spacecraft. Instead of following his men into the Venezuelan space station, he went forward, ducking through the small hatch that led into the flight compartment. While the captain-pilot and the electronics technicians stayed in their bucket seats, the copilot squeezed past Ostrovsky and stood in the hatchway, allowing the major to use the right-hand seat as a command post.

  There was only one communications screen on the control panel in front of Ostrovsky, but the electronics tech was clever enough to split it into four segments, allowing the major to stay in touch simultaneously with the four elements of his command: the troops from his own ship, the troops from the second ship, the team riding out toward the asteroid and Chairman Malik himself, waiting impatiently at Plesetsk.

  It took precisely twelve minutes for the troops to seize complete control of the space station. Squads of soldiers made their way to the communications and the life support centers, both located in the outermost wheel of the station. The other two squads, working “downward” from the station’s hub, took over the landing docks and the electrical power center. Not a shot was fired. The capitalists were caught completely by surprise. Ostrovsky took in the reports from his junior officers and relayed them immediately to Malik.