Privateers (44 page)

“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.”

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.

“Everything 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.

“You’re the boss,” said the technician.

The two men watched silently as the Russian shuttle maneuvered toward the factory’s main airlock. The delta-winged craft rotated ninety degrees, so that the hatch built into its top, just aft of the flight deck, locked onto the factory’s airlock. To Dan and the laser operator, the shuttle appeared to be below them; it was as if they were floating a few hundred yards above it.

The whine of the power generator was almost beyond the range of human hearing as Dan murmured to the technician, “Okay, now. Slice his balls off.”

The tech grunted once, took the wet, chewed cigar butt out of his mouth and jammed it into a pocket on the leg of his coveralls, then began tapping on the buttons of his control console as delicately as a church organist playing a Bach fugue. High overhead, Dan saw one of the big copper mirrors, thick and square as a coffin, swing silently in its jeweled mounting. He knew it was his imagination, but he thought he could feel the air inside this pod crackling as the mirror began to shimmer, like a desert landscape in the heat of the burning sun.

Turning his head so quickly that it spun his body about, Dan saw a scalpel-thin line etching itself slowly across the top of the Russian shuttle, angling across its white body just forward of the root of the rakishly angled tail fin.

“Inner airlock has been opened,” Kaktins’ voice reported over the intercom grill built into the control board. “They are entering main section.”

“Are they in suits?” Dan asked.

“No space suits. Only soldier uni-Ah! One of them shot out the camera. Barbarian thugs!”

“Have you taken all the space suits out of the lockers?”

“Yes, yes,” Kaktins replied, sounding almost miffed at the question. “Just as you ordered. All suits here in control center with us. No suits anywhere else in factory.”

“Good. Fine. We’ll be back there with you in about five minutes.”

“Better hurry. There are about thirty of them, and they are shooting out TV cameras as they spread through factory.”

“We’re done here,” the technician said, pulling a fresh cigar from his chest pocket.

Dan saw that the dark-edged cut had sliced completely across the shuttle’s rear end. That should do it, he thought. When they try to light up their engines to get back home, they’ll find out that they’re stuck here. They can limp back to Nueva Venezuela on their maneuvering thrusters, if they have enough fuel left in them. But they can’t retro-burn and return to Earth.

“Okay,” Dan said, clapping the technician on the back hard enough to send his new cigar spinning out of his mouth. “Let’s haul ass back to the control center.”

Vasily Malik stood uneasily in the vast, echoing, gloomy expanse of the space factory’s main workshop. The machines were still and silent. The big, high-vaulted chamber was only dimly lit; most of the lamps set up among the curving ribs of the ceiling had been turned off.

Malik was accustomed to weightlessness, but he did not enjoy it. He was not an astronaut or engineer who had to learn how to work in zero gravity; he was a government official who experienced zero-gee when he traveled into space and much preferred to feel some solid weight, even the feather-light pull of the Moon, and to know in his guts that up was up and down was down. Now he stood alongside a huge pile of machinery, heavy metal beams and grasping arms that looked like a giant robot’s workbench. The chamber felt chilly to Malik, as if the cold and darkness of the void outside were seeping into it.

Nonsense, he told himself. Randolph thinks that he has me at a disadvantage here. But he will soon learn that I can ferret him out here or anywhere else that he tries to hide from me.

One of the young lieutenants came gliding up to him and stopped himself only by grabbing at the edge of the aluminum beam next to where Malik stood.

“They have evacuated every section my men have searched, sir,” said the lieutenant, a little breathlessly. “The place is empty.”

“They are here,” Malik insisted. “They must have retreated farther, into those pods on the far side of the factory.”

“Yessir,” agreed the lieutenant.

Malik saw that more than a dozen soldiers were milling around the outer areas of this big, shadowy chamber, bobbing slightly in the weightlessness. He pulled a flat, slim portable computer about the size of a hand from his back pocket and touched a button at its base. Its display screen glowed to life.

“According to the plan of this place,” he said as the lieutenant peered over his shoulder, “we have entered the factory from here, the main airlock, and worked our way to here, the machine shop.”

“Yessir.” The lieutenant pointed with an extended finger. “My men have come along this section, past the control center and living quarters, while the other squad has come through this way, where the communications and life support centers are.”

“And they are all empty. No one in them.”

“That is correct, sir.”

“You left men at the communications and life support centers?”

“Yessir! As you ordered.”

Malik studied the computer screen. “Good. They must be hiding out in these arms, where the smelters and lasers are located.”

“If they’re here at all, sir,” ventured the lieutenant.

“Oh, he’s here,” Malik said. “I can smell him. He’s here, cowering in some dark corner like a trapped rat.”

“Malik!” The word boomed through the sepulchral chamber like the voice of God. “Vasily Malik, can you hear me?”

Looking up into the eerie shadows of the steel-ribbed ceiling, Malik shouted, “Randolph! Where are you?”

“I’m at your jugular vein, Malik.”

Without thinking about it consciously, Malik pulled his pistol from the holster at his hip. “Give yourself up, Randolph. Surrender yourself and there will be no more bloodshed. Let Lucita go. There’s no reason for you to hold her as a hostage.”

“You’ve got it all wrong, friend,” Randolph’s voice boomed from the loudspeakers in the ceiling. “You’re the one who has to surrender. You’ve led your men into a trap.”

“Don’t try to bluff your-”

“Haven’t you noticed that it’s getting cold in there? I’ve turned down the air pressure.”

The young lieutenant stared at Malik, his mouth hanging open.

“Your shuttle is crippled and all the passageways leading back to the main airlock have been opened up to vacuum, as of … now.”

Malik heard the clang of airtight hatches slamming shut and the distant, muffled Klaxons that warned of air pressure loss.

“It’s an old Russian strategy.” Randolph chuckled. “Lead the enemy into your territory and scorch the earth behind him. You’re trapped, pal. If I want to, I can pop open the emergency hatches in there. Ever see what happens to a human body when it’s suddenly exposed to vacuum? It’s called explosive decompression. Not pretty.”

“You’re bluffing! We have occupied the control center, the life support center. …”

“Sure you have. But I had the equipment in them disconnected before we retreated back here. We’re running everything from the emergency backup equipment out here in the smelter pod.”

“I don’t believe you!”

Randolph’s laugh grated against Malik’s nerves. “You don’t believe me? Then go pry open one of the hatches. Blow it open with a grenade, if you’re carrying any. I only wish I had a working camera in there so I could see you when your skin bursts and your eyes blow out of your head.”

“You’ve killed my men?”

“Not yet. They’re locked into the communications and life support centers. The airtight hatches will keep them safe, as long as they don’t try to get out.”

Malik fought down a wave of fear-driven fury that threatened to engulf him. He took a deep breath and looked down at the pistol in his hand until he was quite certain that it was not trembling. Still, his palms felt slick with perspiration.

“This delaying action won’t prevent the inevitable, Randolph,” he said, feeling frustrated at having to talk into the shadows. “Soviet spacecraft are on their way here with more troops. …”

“Are they?” Dan’s voice cut in. “You’d better come up here and take a look.”

“What do you mean?”

“Go to the airlock hatch labeled number four. Enter it. We’ll cycle the hatch from here. Follow my instructions when the other side opens and I’ll lead you here to the smelter pod.”

Malik’s eyes scanned the perimeter of the big, darkened chamber. He saw a hatch with the numeral four glowing in white above it.

“Come alone,” Dan’s voice warned. “And leave your gun behind.”

From the control station high above the main smelters, Dan watched the TV monitors as Malik made his way along the long tubular passageway from the main machine shop to the smelter pod. As far as he could see, the Russian was unarmed. His holster flapped emptily. But there were plenty of places to hide a weapon inside the tunic, pants and boots of his uniform.

And he claims to be a martial arts expert, Dan reminded himself. “You’ll have to search him,” he said to Kaktins.

The Latvian nodded, a lopsided grin on his face. “It will be new experience for me for Russian to be prisoner.”