Privateers (3 page)

The Russians had seized the entire space station. Venezuelan national territory or not, it was now under Soviet control. The captain and the two soldiers watched stolidly as Dan pulled on his coveralls, then they marched him out of his cabin and down the long sloping corridor that ran the circumference of the huge, revolving wheel. The captain would not answer any of Dan’s questions; none of the Russians said a word after the captain had awakened Dan and announced his arrest. They locked Dan in one of the storerooms and marched off, out of sight.

Alone, Dan looked around at his improvised jail cell. It was a bare little space, about the size of two telephone booths put together. Three of its walls were heavy wire mesh, the fourth the curving hull of the station structure, slightly cold to the touch despite its thick layers of insulation. The enclosure had been used to store electronics spare parts, Dan remembered. But the Russians had emptied it completely. Just like them, he thought. The first thing they do is turn something useful into a prison cell.

There was nothing at all in the enclosure: no bunk, no bench, nothing but the bare floor and the overhead strip of fluorescent lighting. Looking out through the heavy wire mesh door, Dan saw that the Russians had set up a TV camera in the storeroom on the other side of the narrow walkway that ran the length of the storage area. He grimaced into the camera, hoping that whoever was monitoring him would be startled, at least for a moment.

They must have intercepted the flitters, Dan realized. I hope they’re treating the crews all right. Their spy system must have been a lot better than I thought.

He sank down onto the floor, leaned his back against the stiff metal screen. So ends the illustrious career of the twenty-first century’s premier pirate. It’s all over. They’ll stuff a sponge rubber ball in my mouth and put a bullet through the back of my head. I’ll never see Lucita again. Never have the chance to tell her that I love her.

He felt more angry than afraid. Frustrated rather than fearful. His hands were steady, his insides calm. The finality of it was too real, too inescapable. There was nothing left to hope for. But so much to regret. So many things he still wanted to do. So many scores still unsettled. And Lucita. His mind kept coming back to her. He tried to tell himself that it would be better for her this way. He would have brought her nothing but pain and turmoil. Now she could marry the damned Russian and live her life and forget about him. Then he looked down at his hands and saw that they were clenched into fists.

He almost laughed aloud. You’re not very good at being noble, are you?

It was laughable. A cosmic joke. And it was going to end very soon. The Russians would not take any chances. Bang, you’re dead. And their problems with space piracy are solved. Their monopoly of space is preserved. The rest of the world gets shown who’s boss. With one shot.

Lucita. Can it be that I’ve only known her for less than a year? Funny how time can stretch and contract. How a second can seem as long as infinity. How years can race past and disappear before you realize it. He rested his head against the wire screen and squinted up at the flickering fluorescent tube overhead. The day I met her. The very first day. It was raining. Yes. Poured all day. That’s the day I met Malik, too. And Zach Freiberg.

 

“‘Like the drip, drip, drip of the raindrops,’” Dan quoted under his breath. Then, aloud, he grumbled, “Damn Cole Porter!”

His office window was leaking again. Nothing much, just enough to make an annoying dripping sound and form a soggy puddle in the thick carpeting. The rain teemed down with biblical fury. Dan stood impatiently at the wide, sweeping window of his office and stared out at the downpour. It was as if God were dousing Caracas with a celestial fire hose, pouring torrents of water, solid sheets of it, all over the city. Normally Dan could see the green hills that rose up beyond the city’s boundary and the cable towers for the tramway that went over the mountain to the port at La Guaira. And the wretched squatters’ shacks of cardboard and plywood that infested those hills. But not today. He could barely make out Bolivar Square, just a few streets away from his office tower, in the intensity of the downpour.

Brand-new building and it leaks like a sieve, he complained to himself. Where the hell’s the damned maintenance man? Called him an hour ago. Christ, even in Houston the service was better than this.

His office was on the top floor of the tallest skyscraper in Caracas. It was the office of a man of enormous wealth and power, rich without being garish, imposing without being intimidating. Dan grinned at himself in the faint reflection from the rain-streaked window. At least the roof doesn’t leak, he thought. Then he added, Not yet.

He turned back toward his desk, a bulky, ornate heirloom of Victorian grotesquerie that his great-grandfather had acquired when he had been a young minister in rural Virginia. The office’s couches, chairs and long polished conference table were all in the ultramodern Venezuelan style of leather, mahogany and chrome. The carpets were from India and China. One of them, richly woven with threads of gold, was a gift from his old friend Saito Yamagata. There were no paintings on the walls, but plenty of photographs. None of them were of people. Most showed spacecraft standing on launching platforms, silhouetted against dramatic skies. Others showed views of the Earth as seen from space. The largest one, taking up almost the entire wall opposite Dan’s desk, was of the spidery wheels-within-wheels structure of the Venezuelan space station, 
Nueva Venezuela
. Dan had taken that photograph himself. Just as he had built the station itself.

Behind his desk, on the wall over the low bookshelves built in there, was a framed page from a three-year-old issue of 
Forbes
 magazine. It showed a color photograph of Dan sitting at his desk in his old office in Houston. As a portrait, Dan found it amusingly deceptive. He was looking squarely into the camera, grinning boyishly, a grown-up Tom Sawyer playing business tycoon. His gray eyes sparkled, his sandy hair was tousled as if he had just been engaged in some strenuous action. He was in his shirt-sleeves, tie slightly askew, one hand reaching for the key pad of his phone terminal. Dan knew that he was no beauty, yet his rugged, unhandsome features seemed to intrigue women. It was the smile that got them, he thought. The smile and the eyes. His nose was too big for his own liking, and still slightly bent from the time it had been broken during a drunken lowgravity fistfight on the Moon. A Japanese mining engineer had made a wisecrack about American stupidity and Dan had tackled him and his three compatriots. He had never taken the trouble to have the nose straightened, even after he had become so wealthy. Dan told himself he was not that vain. His plentiful enemies said he was too vain to correct the imperfection.

The text of the article that accompanied Dan’s picture had been written by a young woman who had thought herself a hard-probing reporter, too tough and sophisticated to fall for a grown-up Tom Sawyer. She started the article by describing him:

“A throwback to an earlier era, Daniel Hamilton Randolph is probably the richest thirty-five-year-old industrialist in the world. Scion of a genteel Virginia family that traces its roots back to Thomas Jefferson, this former astronaut, former lunar mining engineer, has created the first multinational corporation to crack the billion-dollar-per-year mark entirely through space industries.

“Randolph is not a big man physically, but he has the inner toughness that comes from making his own way in the world. Unmarried and handsome enough to head 
Playgirl
 magazine’s ‘Ten Most Wanted Men’ list, Dan Randolph has the brilliance, the drive, and the towering ego of a latter-day Ted Turner.”

His desk phone chimed and Dan snapped his fingers in answer. The phone terminal spoke with the dulcet voice of a professional actress whom Dan had once admired enough to buy her an apartment in New York. Her voice, it turned out, had been the sexiest part of her.

“Dr. Freiberg to see you, Mr. Randolph.”

Glancing at the growing puddle on the carpet by the window, he growled, “Where the hell’s the maintenance man?”

Picking up on the key word, the phone replied, “Maintenance department was called one hour and thirty-seven minutes ago. Do you wish to call again?”

“You’re double-damned right I do!”

The phone made no response. It did not understand Dan’s vehement language. He huffed, then said slowly, “Yes. Call the maintenance department again. Repeat the same message and add that I will deduct any damage to my carpeting from the rent.”

“Yes, sir,” said the phone. “And Dr. Freiberg.”

Dan nodded. “Right. Let’s have Dr. Freiberg, by all means.”

Zachary Freiberg, Ph.D., appeared almost instantly in the chair at the left side of Dan’s desk. His holographic image, projected by laser equipment built into the ceiling, scintillated slightly. It was solid enough to look real, although Dan knew that if he extended his hand, it would go through empty air. He could see, faintly, the photos on the far wall through Freiberg’s three-dimensional image. The scientist was slouching slightly in the chair, cross-legged, his eyes focused slightly away from Dan.

“Hello, Mr. Randolph,” said Zachary Freiberg. He was a youngish man, with curly strawberry-blond hair flopping down boyishly over his broad forehead. His face was round, applecheeked. An open-neck shirt, its pocket stuffed with pens, rumpled denims and feet bare except for sandals that were cheap imitations of Japanese getas. Dan got an impression of youth and lazy softness. He suppressed a frown, feeling suddenly overdressed in his own informal shirt and slacks.

“Dr. Freiberg.” Dan forced a smile. “How’s the weather in California?”

Freiberg grinned back at him. “Sunny and warm, what else?”

Unconsciously, Dan sniffed at the dank air of his office. No matter how much he spent on air conditioning, the place always smelled slightly fetid to him, as if the jungle beyond the city’s limits were sneaking back in to reclaim the territory that humans had tried to steal from it. Not even Houston, for all its humidity, was as bad as this. Today, with the tropical torrent tumbling out of the skies, the air felt musty and almost chill. Dan knew it was more in his imagination than reality, but still he nearly shuddered.

“We’re about ready for Noah’s ark here,” he said, making a joke of it.

“Yes,” Freiberg said, “I can see the rain coming down past your window.”

On both sides of it, Dan groused to himself. Aloud, he said, “Dr. Freiberg, I thought that you were all set to join us here at Astro Manufacturing. Now my personnel manager tells me there’s a hitch. What’s the problem?”

Freiberg’s round face grew serious. His eyes strayed slightly away from Dan’s, avoiding direct contact.

“Well, uh …” he stammered, “it’s, uh … well, it’s a little embarrassing.”

Dan said nothing and waited for Freiberg to sort out his conflicting emotions. The scientist looked overweight to Dan, both physically and emotionally. Still wearing his baby fat. But Astro Manufacturing’s chief scientist and personnel director both insisted that Freiberg was the best planetary geochemist they could find. He was the man they needed, and therefore the man Dan wanted to hire. Freiberg had agreed to this appointment with Dan, so obviously the man was willing to talk. It would just take him a few moments to get over the hang-up of politeness. Dan had learned years earlier that most people would rather make asses of themselves than say something they considered impolite. They were trained from childhood to be pleasant and never utter a word that might upset someone. “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all,” was the wisdom that long generations of parents instilled in their trusting offspring. So the kids grew up to tie themselves in knots, holding back their true feelings, smiling when they wanted to spit, and they wound up paying exorbitant fees to psychologists or going to pop therapy courses where they finally liberated themselves enough to be able to say in public, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

Freiberg squirmed in his chair and twitched for a few moments, then said at last, “The problem is that all my friends tell me I’d be almost committing treason if I went to work for you.”

“Treason?” Dan snapped.

“A lot of people here think that you’re a …” Freiberg’s face reddened. “Well, a traitor.”

Dan leaned back in his leather chair and eyed the younger man carefully. He had expected something like this. At least it was out in the open now.

Carefully, calmly, he replied, “According to the Constitution, treason consists of giving aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States.”

“That’s merely the legal definition … .”

“Do you think I’m a traitor to the United States because I’ve moved my corporation’s headquarters to Caracas?”

“You left the country.”

Dan forced his voice to remain calm, reasonable. “In a sense, Dr. Freiberg, you could say that the country left me. I’m in the business of running factories in orbit. The United States government decided to close down all its space activities and revoke the operating licenses of all the firms working in space. I had no choice. It was either leave the country or go out of business.”

“Yes, I know that, but …”

Dan made himself relax and grin. “Now look …” He almost added, “
kid
,” but held it back. “My motto has always been, ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going—to where the going’s easier.’”

Freiberg did not laugh. He merely looked more uncomfortable than ever.

Dan abandoned his attempt at humor. “The American government gave up all its space operations at the insistence of the Russians. You know that, don’t you?”

Freiberg nodded glumly.

“So, in a sense, if I’m working against anyone or anything, I’m working against the Kremlin. I’m carrying on the work that America would be doing if Washington hadn’t caved in to the Soviets.”