Privateers (32 page)

“No crew pod in sight,” Carstairs muttered.

“No radiator fins or any other signs of a life support system,” said Zlotnik. “She’s unmanned.”

“I pick up two transponders,” Vargas added, his eyes on the electronics control panel in front of him. “They are signaling at the usual Soviet frequencies, just as all the others do. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Dan turned the radar scan to maximum range and studied the orange-glowing screen in front of him. “No other spacecraft in view. She’s unescorted.”

“Ours for the tyking,” said Carstairs.

For half an instant Dan hesitated. Then he said, “Okay, let’s get to work.”

Carstairs pressed his thumb against the button that actuated the canopy release, and the glass bubble silently, smoothly swung up and away from the cockpit. One by one the four astronauts unlatched their safety harnesses, floated out of their seats and clambered slowly, hand over hand, along the grips that studded the latticework midsection of the spacecraft. From the equipment pods there they detached one-man maneuvering units, which looked rather like high-backed chairs minus the seats. Dan strapped himself into one of the jet backpacks slowly, with deliberate care.

“Need any help, boss?” Carstairs chuckled in Dan’s earphones. He was already floating free of the spacecraft, ready to jet out on his own.

Dan smiled. “I can do for myself, thanks.”

“1 just thought someone your age, you know …”

“Listen, pal, there are old astronauts and there are bold astronauts-”

The Aussie finished in unison with Dan, “But there are no old, bold astronauts.”

The jet backpacks were one-man spacecraft, complete with their own thrusters, electrical power, tool kits and life support systems. They turned an individual astronaut into a one-man spacecraft, independent and free to maneuver for two hours or more.

It took almost a full two hours for them to accomplish their tasks. First all four men checked the freighter’s spherical hull for booby traps or alarms. Then Zlotnik and Vargas detached the ship’s two radio transponders, electronic beepers that told the mission controllers in the Soviet space station, Kosmograd, and back on the Moon at Lunagrad, where the ore carrier was. They linked the two transponders with a length of plastic line, which they unreeled from a heavily insulated container made of foam plastic. The line became as rigid as steel after ten minutes’ exposure to vacuum, and ensured that the two transponders would be separated by exactly the same distance they had been apart on the freighter itself. Then they attached angular metallic radar reflectors to the line, so that a radar probe from Kosmograd would get a return blip of just about the same intensity as the freighter would yield. To the

Russian mission controllers at their consoles in the space station, it would look as if the freighter were still on course, placidly gliding toward its scheduled destination.

Dan and Carstairs found the freighter’s electronic guidance unit, a black box the size of Dan’s hand. They disconnected it and replaced it with a black box of their own, preprogrammed to alter the freighter’s course by slight degrees until it was heading for Nueva Venezuela instead of Kosmograd. The freighter was propelled by its own rocket motors, which burned the cheapest and most abundant propellants available: powdered aluminum and oxygen, scraped up from the Moon’s dusty soil by the lunar Gulag miners.

The new guidance unit Dan connected to the Russian control system immediately activated the rocket motors. Dan felt a sudden nudge of acceleration, light, but as definite as a tap on the shoulder. They wanted to move the freighter into its new trajectory with as little thrust as possible, both to conserve the freighter’s supply of propellants and to make as small a cloud of radar-reflecting exhaust gases as possible.

Don’t attract the attention of the mission controllers, Dan warned himself. Let them think everything is so normal that they can take a nice, quiet nap.

The final task the four astronauts had was to make the freighter invisible to Soviet radars. From pouches the size of mailbags, they dug up gloved handfuls of glittering metallic dust and strewed them into the emptiness around the freighter and their own flitter. As he jetted slowly in a widening arc, sprinkling the radar-absorbing dust, Dan suddenly got an image of Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell. He laughed aloud.

“You all right?” Zlotnik asked.

“Sure,” Dan replied. “Sure.”

The growing cloud would absorb radar waves: not completely, but enough to mask the freighter and their flitter so that the normal Soviet radar surveillance would not see the ore carrier change course. If, for some reason, the Soviet controllers directed a high-power radar beam or a laser probe at the freighter, the dust cloud could be penetrated. Dan was banking on the hope that the Russians were not going to be alert enough to use their more sensitive equipment.

As he jetted carefully around the freighter, Dan recalled how the flatlanders back on Earth thought that working in zero gravity was like floating on air, when actually it was more like swimming the English Channel. He was soaking with sweat, and the air circulation fan in his helmet was buzzing its loudest to keep his visor from fogging over.

Finally they were finished. Dan hung in the dark emptiness, the huge glowing Earth spread like an overwhelming vision of beauty, off to his right. The Sun was at his back. The Soviet freighter loomed in front of him, with their flitter hanging alongside it. The cloud of radar-absorbing dust glittered faintly around him, shimmering slightly where the sunlight struck it at the right angle to create a fragile, shifting rainbow. Already the transponders and radar reflectors were too far away for Dan to see.

They jetted back to the flitter, unstrapped and stowed the backpacks, and slid into their cockpit seats. Dan felt bone-tired, exhausted emotionally as well as physically. As Carstairs closed the canopy over them and punched in the course corrections to allow the flitter to stay alongside the ore carrier, Vargas fussed over his electronics console.

“Radio transmissions from Kosmograd seem normal,” he reported.

“What about Lunagrad?” Dan asked.

Vargas muttered to himself for a few moments, then Dan heard Russian folk music in his helmet earphones: balalaikas and zithers and a mournful baritone voice.

“Christ, that’s dreary!” Dan said.

“Must be what they ply to the miners,” Carstairs joked, “to cheer ‘em up.”

For the thousandth time that day, Dan wished he could open his visor and scratch his nose, rub his eyes or just run a hand across the stubble on his chin.

“We’ve got to pressurize the cockpit next mission,” he said. “Sitting in these suits for ten, twelve hours is no picnic.”

“Don’t know about you,” Carstairs agreed, “but it smells like a bloody sweat sock in here.”

“That’s because you don’t spray under your arms,” Zlotnik kidded.

“And another thing,” Dan said, ignoring the banter. “There ought to be some way to dispense the radar chaff automatically. Having us flit around like a quartet of double-damned fairies is ridiculous.”

“A quartet of what?” Carstairs quipped.

“Don’t get cute.”

“You’re thirty-six years too lyte with that advice, chum.”

“Vargas, can you turn off the Russian music?” Dan asked. “It’s damned depressing.”

“Yessir,” the young Venezuelan said.

For several moments, Dan heard nothing at all except the hum of his suit’s air fan and the hiss of his own breathing.

Then Carstairs began crowing, “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum … sixteen men on a dead man’s chest.”

Suddenly they were all laughing.

“We did it!” Zlotnik said. “We’re pirates! We stole it right out from under their radar noses and they don’t even know it yet!”

Dan laughed with them, but inwardly he wondered what the Russians would do once they found out about his piracy.

Dan stayed at the Nueva Venezuela factory complex for an additional six hours, long enough to see the captured freighter unloaded and then swiftly broken up. He watched from the factory’s control center as a picked team of workers used industrial lasers to cut the freighter’s spherical shell into long slivers of metal, like a giant clockwork-orange skin being sliced apart. The dismembered freighter was fed into the factory’s smelters, together with the ores it had carried. Dan demanded that they get the job done quickly, before the Soviets realized what had happened and sent a team of armed inspectors to the factory.

Satisfied that the evidence had not only been destroyed, but turned into useful raw material, Dan showered quickly, changed into a fresh set of coveralls and rode the next regularly scheduled shuttle back to Caracas. He helicoptered from the landing field to the roof of his downtown building. When he breezed back into his own office, Pete Weston was waiting for him, his usual worried frown wrinkling his high-domed face as he sat in the anteroom, chatting with Dan’s new secretary. Weston jumped to his feet as Dan came in, still wearing the sky-blue coveralls he had put on that morning at Nueva Venezuela.

The lawyer was wearing a light sports jacket and pale blue slacks. Even his shirt and tie looked less rigid than usual. Dan grinned at him, realizing that Weston was finally learning how to relax and be more comfortable.

“You’re looking dapper this morning,” Dan said.

Weston forced a quick smile, but raised one hand. A single flimsy sheet of paper was clutched in it.

“We’ve got troubles, boss.”

Dan nodded at the new girl, wondering if she had been told what had happened to her predecessor.

“Come on in, Pete,” he said, opening the thick oak door to his private office.

“Financially,” Weston said, once the door was firmly closed, “your little hijacking expedition is a big success. The ores alone were worth slightly more than ten million.”

Dan slid into the big leather chair behind his desk. “But?” he prompted.

Weston’s worried frown deepened as he dropped his slight frame into the chair in front of Dan’s desk. “But the Russians are apeshit. They’ve been burning up the telephone links between Moscow and Caracas all morning. Their satellites have been put on full alert. The Soviet space committee has requested an emergency meeting of the IAC. We’ve received an official request for an inspection of our facilities, and my spies in Hernandez’s office tell me that he’s received a request for a complete inspection of Nueva Venezuela.”

“Which he will grant,” Dan muttered.

“We’re granting their request, too,” Weston said. It was not advice, it was a fait accompli. “Either that or they’ll send in tanks and troops.”

Dan waved a hand in the air. “Let them inspect! There’s nothing for them to find.”

“They’ll want to interrogate Astro employees.”

“No,” Dan snapped. “That they can’t do. We’re under Venezuelan law. The Venezuelan police can interrogate our people, if they arrest one of us for breaking Venezuelan law. But the Russians can’t.”

“They can if the Venezuelans allow them to,” Weston pointed out.

Dan gave him a sour look.

“It works this way.” the lawyer said, hunching forward in his chair. “International law supercedes Venezuelan law. If you’re suspected of breaking international law-like committing an act of piracy-the nation in which you reside has the responsibility and the authority to arrest you and hold you for trial.”

“So?”

“So the locals here could allow the Russians to participate in the interrogation of anyone arrested in this matter.”

“Hmm.” Dan leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “Looks like I’d better get to Hernandez and make sure he’s not too sore at us.”

Weston almost laughed. “Not too sore? He’s madder than a high school principal in the middle of a food fight.”

Dan blinked at the lawyer. “A high school …” With a shake of his head, he reached for the phone keyboard. “I’d better give him a call.”

“Don’t bother,” said Weston. “He’s already called here. Four times. Wants you in his office at eleven sharp.”

“Uh-oh. That sounds grim.”

“I’d be willing to bet that Vasily Malik will be there.”

Nodding, Dan agreed, “Wouldn’t surprise me at all. Maybe you’d better come along, too.”

“Okay,” the lawyer said. He got to his feet. “I’d better change into a more businesslike suit.”

Dan broke into laughter. “Oh, for God’s sake, Pete! You look fine. You’re not going to a funeral, after all.”

Weston looked highly unconvinced.

Lucita had awakened that morning to the sound of a gentle but insistent tapping on her bedroom door. She opened her eyes and saw that it was still dark. With an effort, she focused on the red-glowing digits of the clock on the bedtable: 4:44 A.M.

Feeling more angry than alarmed, she groped in the darkness until she found the silk peignoir she had left on the bed, while the knocking continued, growing louder. As Lucita pulled the robe over her nightgown, she recognized the voice of her maid, Estrellita:

“Seńorita, please. Your father told me to wake you.”

Lucita clicked on the little lamp atop the bureau as she opened the door a crack. “What is it?” she asked sleepily.

Estrellita was also in her nightrobe, a plain cotton shift. “Your father said to wake you. Your fiance is coming here. From the Land of Red. He is flying here on a rocket!”

Lucita showered and dressed quickly, but took the time to brush her hair properly and make certain that her face showed no trace of sleepiness. She pulled on a knee-length wraparound surplice of turquoise slashed with bold diagonal stripes. A hint of jewelry at her wrists and ears and she was ready to face her father-and her fiancé.

The breakfast room was filled with fresh new sunlight by the time Lucita came downstairs. Her father was draining a cup of coffee, rigid with tension as he sat in the white wicker chair. He was fully dressed in a gray double-breasted suit. His usual breakfast was spread before him on the glass-topped table, but he had touched none of it. Malik was not there.