Privateers (23 page)

“What?”

“Radar and telemetry have been tracking them routinely until this morning. Looks like a Russian spacecraft burned in on them in a very high energy trajectory and made a rendezvous with them at approximately ten-thirty A.M.”

“The Russians boarded them?”

“From what we were able to get out over the radio link, yes. Then the link went dead.”

“Was there a fight? Is anybody hurt?”

“Don’t know. All we’ve got for sure is that the Russian spacecraft came from the Moon, intercepted our ship, and now it’s heading back to Lunagrad-with Dolphin One in tow.”

Dan felt the breath sag out of him.

“Did you hear me, boss? The Russians are taking our ship back to the Moon with them. And our crew-or whoever’s left alive among them.”

“Are you certain that your information is accurate?” Njombe’s deep voice sounded almost like a growl in Dan’s earphones.

He turned to face the Angolan, although all he could see was a featureless gold-tinted visor set into the helmet of the black man’s space suit. Like the five others of his desperate little band, Njombe looked somewhat like a knight decked out in white armor. But Dan saw that the “armor” was dingy here and there, and the heavy boots they wore lacked spurs.

“For the amount of money I bribed that little code clerk with,” he answered, “the information ought to be golden-literally.”

The six of them were hovering inside the big, sepulchral sphere of an empty Soviet ore freighter, one of the dozens of globular unmanned spacecraft that regularly plied the route between the mines on the Moon and Kosmograd, where the ores were transshipped to their buyers among the Third World space factories.

They had boarded the empty Russian freighter when it had been less than twelve hours away from its landing center at

Lunagrad, the Soviet base on the Moon’s Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquility, not far from the abandoned site of the old Apollo 11 “Tranquility Base,” where men first set foot on the Moon’s dusty surface.

Dan had swiftly decided that he had no option but to force the Russians who ran Lunagrad to give up their prisoners. And it had to be done while the men from his Dolphin One spacecraft were still on the Moon, before they were transferred to the Soviet Union for trial as pirates. He had left Pete Weston and his other corporate lawyers to argue with the Soviets, the UN and Hernandez’s Venezuelans. While they talked, Dan acted.

Nobuhiko Yamagata was a Soviet prisoner. Dan could not allow that. He was responsible for Nobo. It wasn’t that Saito would blame him for Nobo’s danger; the youngster had been eager for the asteroid mission, no matter what the risks. But Dan felt personally responsible for his old friend’s son. There was no escaping that. It was his fault that Nobo and the others were being held prisoners at Lunagrad. And Dan Randolph met his responsibilities, paid his debts, one way or the other.

He had sailed the sloop directly to the launching center on the man-made island off La Guaira and ordered a helicopter to fly Lucita back to her beach club.

“Tell your father what’s happened,” he commanded Lucita, “although I suspect he already knows. Tell him that I expect the government of Venezuela to protest in the strongest possible terms. There are four Venezuelan citizens among the crew of Dolphin One.”

“But what was the spacecraft doing so far away from Earth?” she asked, confused.

“I’m sending a man around to explain the whole mission to him. It was a private venture of Astro Manufacturing, but there were Venezuelan nationals on board.”

He bundled her onto the helicopter, after getting one of the women from the administration center to find a pair of coveralls that Lucita could put on over her skimpy bikini. As the

helicopter clattered off, Dan dashed back to the administration building and began asking his best and most experienced astronauts to volunteer for a rescue mission.

Njombe was the first man he asked. The big black man stared goggle-eyed when he heard what Dan had in mind.

“Raid Lunagrad and get the men back? That’s crazy!”

“You have a better suggestion? The Soviets have eight of our men. They’re going to try them for piracy. Piracy! Double-goddammit to hell, they’re threatening to hang them!”

“They can’t do that,” Njombe said.

“They’re not going to get the chance to. We’re snatching them back. And you’re going to help me do it.”

The big Angolan started to frown, but it came out smiling. “Not me. I’m not crazy.”

“I thought those men were your friends,” Dan snapped. “Vargas, Carstairs … they’d come through for you if you needed help, wouldn’t they?”

“That’s not fair, boss.”

“Since when have I been fair? It’s an unfair universe, friend.”

Scowling, Njombe said reluctantly. “All you’re going to accomplish is getting more of us taken prisoner by the Russians.”

“We’re going to need five or six others,” Dan said.

Njombe started to say, “I’ll pick-”

“No, I’ll pick them,” Dan snapped. “I’m leading this mission, and I’ll pick the team.”

“You’re going yourself?”

Dan felt surprised that Njombe would think otherwise. “Certainly.”

The Angolan broke into a grin. “Shouldn’t be any trouble getting half a dozen men to go with you. After all, if the boss gets himself killed, who’s going to sign the paychecks?”

They had shuttled up to Nueva Venezuela that night, after several hours of computer runs to check out the best way to implement Dan’s plan. With barely an hour’s layover, seven astronauts-led by Dan himself-left the space station packed aboard a single needle-shaped flitter. But instead of going to the factory, they angled off on a high-energy boost to one of the empty Soviet ore carriers plying its way placidly back to Lunagrad.

Boarding the empty freighter had been easy. Now they waited for it to land, under remote command from the controllers at Lunagrad, on the roiled dusty surface of the Moon. Their flitter rode behind them with no one left in it except Goldman, whose job was to put the spacecraft in orbit around the Moon and stay there until Dan brought the rest of the crew and the captives up to him.

The flitter coasted in the radar shadow of the big spherical freighter. But Dan knew that once the freighter started its descent and Goldman moved their spacecraft into a Moon-circling orbit, it would become immediately visible to the Soviet radars at Lunagrad.

“Have you thought about what Goldman’s going to do if they start shooting at him?” Njombe asked.

With nothing to do except hover inside the dark interior of the freighter’s vast, spherical cargo hold, waiting for the giant eggshell of a spacecraft to touch down on the Moon, Dan and his team had plenty of time to worry over every detail.

“No anti-satellite weapons at Lunagrad,” said Kaktins, the lanky, wild-haired Latvian engineer who had left the Soviet Union for a vacation in Sweden four years earlier and never returned. Dan recognized his heavily accented English; in their space suits, they were almost indistinguishable from one another, except for gross differences in size. The names stenciled on their suit chests had all been painted over.

“No weapons?” Njombe sounded unconvinced. “You’re certain?”

“No anti-satellite weapons,” repeated Kaktins. “Guns for shooting people-plenty.”

“Hey, that’s a big load off my mind,” wisecracked Elger, the smallest of the six, and the only woman among them. “Goldman’s safe as in bed; the only guns they got are for us.”

She had literally fought her way onto the team, taking one of the male astronauts in two straight aikido falls when he had challenged her fitness for the mission. Most of the astronauts had eagerly volunteered to help rescue their friends from Lunagrad, once they knew that Dan was going. He had been surprised by their fervor.

“What I could never figure out,” said O’Leary, “is why the Russkies use these stupid freighters. Why don’t they just catapult the ores off the Moon?”

“You mean with a mass driver?” Njombe asked.

“An electric catapult system, yeah.”

“That’s the way we would do it,” Dan said. “It’s cheaper and more efficient. But the Russians aren’t worried about cost or efficiency. Somebody in their bureaucracy must have written a memo about the safety hazards of flinging bucketloads of dirt off the lunar surface and having them flying around between the Moon and the space stations.”

“But they’d move along perfectly predictable trajectories, just like any spacecraft.”

Dan shook his head inside his helmet. “Astronomical laws and common sense don’t count with bureaucrats. Only rules and regulations.”

“And memos,” Elger added. “The longer and harder to read, the more points you earn.”

“It’s stupid!” O’Leary said.

“Not altogether,” countered Njombe. “These freighters are powered by rockets that burn powdered aluminum and oxygen, both obtained from the lunar soil. It’s almost as cheap as an electric catapult system would be.”

“Not by a factor of ten, I’ll bet,” said O’Leary.

Dan let them debate. They were talking out their nervousness. He had gotten them to volunteer quickly, before they could really think about the risks involved. Now, with nothing to do but wait, the realities of this mad escapade were catching up with them.

And with Dan. There were a thousand ways this mission could go sour. Seven people to attack a Soviet base housing hundreds of Russians. Seven against Thebes, he said to himself. Six, really. All we’ve got going for us is surprise. Maybe it’ll be enough. Maybe. If not …

A sudden lurching feeling.

“Retrorockets,” Njombe’s bass voice rang. “We’re on the way in.”

Dan looked at the luminous numerals of the watch on his wrist, then turned on his helmet light to study the schedule taped just above it. On schedule.

The astronauts floated down to the floor of the big empty chamber. Strange, Dan thought, how even the slightest pull of gravity brings back all your Earthbound concepts of up, down, floor, ceiling. Tensely, they sat on the grimy metal plates, silent now, waiting for the final thump of landing. Several times they felt staggering lurches as the retrorockets fired brief pulses.

“Sloppy work,” Elger muttered.

But with only the Moon’s gentle gravity to contend with, the bursts of thrust were small, light, almost trivial. Dan turned his suit radio to the frequency used by Lunagrad’s ground controllers, but nothing more than a hiss of static penetrated the spherical shell of the freighter. A final surge of thrust made him feel almost heavy, and then the craft thumped once and became still. For an instant none of the six moved. Dan felt the old familiar tug of the Moon’s gravity.

He got to his feet carefully, remembering that he weighed only a sixth of his normal weight on Earth. Njombe, who had never been on the Moon before, overdid it and bounded upward like a giant frog. But he had time to get his legs straightened and landed on his feet in a lunar slow motion.

“Terrific,” somebody said. “Can you do Swan Lake!”

“Just be careful,” Dan cautioned. “You’ve all worked in zero-gee. Don’t let the feeling of weight fool you; we’re not on Earth.”

Slowly, almost hesitantly, they clumped across the metal floor plates to the man-sized hatch. The entire freighter could split open like a giant egg when it was being loaded with cargo. Dan’s information, obtained over several years of carefully cultivated contacts around the world, was that the standard procedure at Lunagrad was to send an inspection team out to the newly landed freighter to check it out before loading it with a new shipment of ores.

But how long before the inspection team gets here? he wondered. Minutes, or hours? And a voice in his head asked, Or days?

It seemed like hours, but only twelve minutes had elapsed on Dan’s wristwatch when they “heard” the hatch being opened. The interior of the freighter was an airless vacuum, just as the lunar surface outside. But Dan could feel the vibrations of the hatch’s mechanism working through the soles of his booted feet, coming up from the deck plates. The others “heard” it too; they flattened out along the curving bulkhead on either side of the hatch.

Two men in space suits stepped inside, the lamps on their helmets throwing pools of light into the dark interior of the cargo hold.

“She’s the best lay in Tyuratam,” Dan heard one of them saying, over the suit-to-suit radio frequency.

“That’s what you say. …”

Their conversation never got any further. Dan’s men overpowered the two Russians and quickly wrapped their arms to their sides with long strips of Velcro while Njombe and Kaktins squeezed the Russians’ air hoses-not enough to really harm them, just enough to make them understand what might happen.

“Be quiet,” Dan commanded in Russian, “don’t struggle, and do what you’re told. Otherwise you’ll be dead men.”

With tools from their belt kits, Elger and Kaktins disconnected the Russians’ suit radios. Then the six astronauts left the freighter and closed the hatch behind them.

“How much air in their tanks?” Dan asked Kaktins over their suit-to-suit frequency.

“Four hours, if they filled tanks as regulations say,” answered the Latvian as he climbed up into the cab of the little tractor parked outside the freighter. He added, “And if suits working hokay. They don’t check out equipment too good sometimes. Lazy stupid.”

The five others clambered up onto the tractor as Kaktins briefly scanned its dashboard, then grasped the two control levers and pushed them forward. Dan felt the electric motor vibrate as the tractor lurched into motion. Hanging on to its rear fender, Dan swept his gaze around the lunar horizon. It was night on the Moon; the Sun would not rise for another nine days. But the Earth shone bright and huge in the dark starry sky, aswirl with white clouds against living blue, bathing the barren lunar landscape with soft light. The big blue marble, Dan thought. At this distance it seemed to be an oasis of life set in the implacably cold and black emptiness of the universe.