Privateers (41 page)

Tight-lipped, Malik replied, “You will get a fair trial.”

“Fair? I want a great trial!”

“It will be difficult to keep world opinion from demanding your immediate execution,” Malik said, “once the asteroid strikes.”

“The aster-” Dan felt his breath catch in his throat. He stopped in his tracks and whirled on Malik. “What the hell have you done?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Dan could see the two officers reaching for their pistols. Lucita was behind him, Malik’s smugly grinning face only a few inches away.

“Your asteroid, Mr. Randolph. It is about to undergo a change in course.”

“That can’t happen… .”

“But it will happen,” Malik said. “I guarantee it. Your asteroid is going to strike somewhere in the state of Nebraska. Between the cities of Omaha and Lincoln, I am told.”

Dan’s fists clenched.

“The asteroid will strike just a day or so before your trial begins,” Malik added. “The explosion will destroy everything for at least a hundred miles around the impact site, and leave a crater like the one in Arizona. It will also destroy any shred of sympathy the Americans or anyone else might have for you.”

Dan could feel Lucita’s hand on his sleeve, but he yanked free of her. Malik took an involuntary half step backward, away from him.

“Attention!” crackled a voice from the intercom loudspeakers, set up in the ceiling of the passageway, alongside the fluorescent light tubes. “Attention! Mr. Dan Randolph, your attention, please!”

It wasn’t until he saw the puzzled expression on Malik’s face that Dan realized the voice was speaking in Japanese.

“This is Nobo, Mr. Randolph. We have taken control of the entire area between the visitors lounge and the communications center, including the Russian shuttle that is docked to the visitors lounge emergency hatch.”

Malik pulled the pistol from his holster. “Who is that? What is he saying?”

“Stay put!” Dan shouted in Japanese. “Hold tight until further orders.”

Malik pointed the gun into Dan’s face. “What did you say? Tell me or-”

Without even thinking about it, Dan grabbed the Russian’s wrist, twisted the gun out of his hand and swung Malik around to shield him from the guns of the other two men.

“Get behind me!” he commanded Lucita. Holding Malik’s pistol to the Russian’s temple as he twisted Malik’s arm in a hard hammerlock, he shouted to the other two in English, “Put your guns down and your hands on top of your heads or I’ll blow his damned brains out!”

They stood frozen, uncertain, guns held tightly in their outstretched hands.

Dan cocked the pistol and rammed its muzzle against Malik’s ear. “Drop them! Now!”

Ostrovsky and the lieutenant let the guns slip from their fingers. They clunked against the floor.

Dan backed toward the hatch that he knew was only a few dozen feet away. Every passageway and corridor in the station was studded with airtight hatches which would close automatically in case of a drop in air pressure in one section of the station.

“You can’t get away,” Malik muttered, grunting as Dan dragged him by his twisted arm. “My men control the entire station and more are on their way.”

Dan snapped, “Save your breath. It might be your last.”

With Lucita slightly behind him and the two disarmed Russians standing immobile, hands atop their heads, Dan pulled Malik across the metal strip that marked the hatchway.

“Lucita, see the panel on the wall to your left? Press the red button.”

She did, and immediately a hooting horn began to wail. Dan pushed Malik away from him as the heavy metal hatch slid swiftly shut, clanging into place between him and the staggering Russian.

He reached for Lucita’s wrist with his free hand. “Come on! We don’t have a second to lose!”

Ostrovsky and the lieutenant scooped up their pistols and rushed to Malik’s side.

“He’s taken the bait after all,” Malik said with a smile. To Ostrovsky, the smile looked somewhat forced.

They heard Randolph’s voice gabbling over the station intercom in Japanese.

“What is he saying?” Ostrovsky wondered aloud.

Malik seemed fully in command of himself. “It doesn’t matter. We control the station and there is no place he can hide-for long. Get this blasted hatch open, quickly.”

Ostrovsky bent over the control panel built into the wall beside the hatch. He began tapping on the various buttons.

To the lieutenant, Malik said, “You will persuade one of the station’s personnel to translate this Japanese talk for us.”

“Yessir!”

The hatch slid back, revealing an empty passageway.

“Major Ostrovsky, you will assemble a search party of ten men and go hunting for Randolph.”

“He is armed,” the major said, “and will undoubtedly use your fiancée as a hostage.”

“Undoubtedly,” Malik agreed. “But hostage or not, I want him found and taken. Dead or alive.”

“We have taken a total of eight soldiers,” Nobuhiko said. In the small display screen of the telephone, he looked both pleased and anxious. “They must have at least fifty more in the station.”

Dan Randolph nodded grimly at him. “And from what Malik said, reinforcements are on the way.”

“What should we do?”

Dan was standing in the equipment bay of the station’s lunar section. When Nueva Venezuela had first been built, this wheel was designed to rotate at a speed that exactly duplicated the gentle tug of the Moon’s gravity, so that personnel could adapt themselves to walking, lifting, pouring liquids, working and living at one-sixth the weight they experienced on Earth. But even before the station’s construction was finished, the Soviets had established their exclusive domination of the Moon, and the lunar wheel became just another area in which to store equipment. Dan thought of it as a large garage or attic, dimly lit, stuffed with dusty old relics and long-forgotten crates of junk.

It was a good place to hide in, and now he and Lucita were there in the shadowy netherworld where an experienced man could jump twenty feet high and turn half a dozen somersaults before touching his feet lightly to the floor again.

Thinking out loud while Nobo watched, Dan said, “We’ve got several hundred Astro employees and visitors aboard the station, but they’re noncombatants. They’d just get themselves hurt if they tried to help us.”

“They have been ordered by the Russians to stay in their quarters.”

“Yeah, I know. But pretty soon now Malik’s going to hit on the idea of dragging them out and using them as hostages. If we don’t surrender, he’ll start shooting them, either one at a time or in bunches.”

“He wouldn’t dare!”

“Wouldn’t he?”

“Those people are citizens of many different countries,” Nobo said, “Venezuela, the United States, Japan …”

“How many fighters do you actually have?” Dan asked.

“Eleven, including myself.”

“And I make it an even dozen. Against at least fifty armed Russian soldiers.”

“What about the security personnel aboard the station? Surely they-”

Dan waved him to silence. “They’re guards, not soldiers. They’d be cut down in minutes.”

“Then I don’t see what we can do.”

“I do,” Dan said. “First, get word to your father. Tell him to alert all the other space leaders that the Russians intend to seize their stations within the next few days. Second, tell him that there’s a Russian spacecraft on its way to our asteroid. They intend to alter its course and have it strike the United States.”

Nobo flinched with shock. “Madness!” he blurted.

“That spacecraft’s got to be stopped,” Dan said. “1 don’t know how, but it’s got to be stopped.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Third, get yourself and everybody there with you, including your Russian prisoners, into that shuttle and fly it back to Caracas… .”

“And leave you here?”

Dan scratched at his stubbly jaw. “You’re not going to be able to do battle with fifty trained soldiers. Get the hell out while the getting’s good. Alert the others. Tell them what’s going on here. Get the word out! We’ll hold on here as long as we can.”

“But what will you do?” Nobo asked. Glancing at Lucita, standing beside him utterly calm, her fate entirely in his hands, Dan asked in reply, “Have they taken the factory yet?”

“No, I don’t believe they have even tried.” “Good. We’ll go there. It’s more easily defended.” “The Soviets could destroy it with their antimissile lasers.” “Not while I’ve got Malik’s fiancee with me.” Nodding, Nobo said, “Then I will go there, too.” “Get yourself home. That’s an order.” Before Nobuhiko could reply, Dan clicked off the phone connection and turned to Lucita. “Ever used a jetpack before?” She shook her head.

With a grin, he said, “You’re in for a thrill.” He led her down to one of the emergency airlocks and helped her climb into a Day-Glo orange pressure suit. It hung on a wall rack next to a row of equipment lockers like a headless empty suit of armor, the bulky jetpack and life support tanks already fastened to its back. Lucita virtually disappeared inside the suit; it swallowed her right up to the chin. Dan laughed at the sight of her peering out of it like a child wearing a grownup’s outfit.

“Are your hands inside the gloves?” he asked. “Can you move your fingers?”

He saw that the fingers of the gloves wriggled.

“Good.”

“But my feet are not inside the boots, I think,” Lucita said.

“That’s not important.”

He fitted the helmet over her head as she watched, silent and wide-eyed. Then he checked out all the suit’s seals and connections. The maintenance label on its left leg said it had gone through a complete inspection only a week earlier. Still, Dan took the time to check everything thoroughly.

There are bold astronauts and old astronauts, he repeated to himself as he worked, trying to forget that the Russians were ransacking the station to find them. No sense doing them the favor of killing ourselves.

He was less thorough with his own suit, satisfied to rely on the inspection tag. From the equipment lockers he took a tether and clipped it from a ring on the waist of his suit to a similar ring on Lucita’s.

“Whither I goest, so goest thou,” he said, his voice sounding muffled inside the helmet.

He saw her nod and heard in his earphones, “Won’t they shoot at us, once we are outside the station?”

“If they see us, they might. But they won’t know which one of us is me, and which is you.”

“Vasily would take that risk.”

Dan looked at her. She was serious, but not afraid.

“Would you rather go back to him? …”

“Never! I want to be with you.”

“Even though we might both be killed?”

“I would rather die with you, my Yanqui, than live with him.”

Dan felt a wave of blazing, brilliant warmth surge through him. His knees felt suddenly weak. His spine tingled.

Clumsily, inside the bulky space suit, he reached out for Lucita and pulled her close. They could not kiss; the helmets made it impossible. But Dan held her for a long moment.

“I love you, Lucita,” he said.

“And I love you, Daniel.”

Suddenly the ludicrousness of it struck Dan. He laughed aloud. “We must look like a pair of abominable snowmen trying to make love.”

She laughed too. “Do they make space suits big enough for two?”

“I’ll have one built,” he said, “just as soon as we …” The laughter died on his lips as he remembered where they were and what they were facing.

But Lucita seemed totally unafraid. “I am ready to go with you.”

With a nod, Dan opened another equipment locker and pulled out something that looked almost like an old-fashioned blunderbuss: a long slim rod with a flared nozzle at one end. The rod was taller than he was, even in his helmet and suit. Handgrips studded the upper half of its length, and there was a cluster of small cylinders fastened to the end near the nozzle.

“They call this a broomstick,” he told Lucita as he tapped the control pad on the wall next to the airlock hatch with his free hand. “We’ll ride on it faster than the Wicked Witch of the West.”

They stepped into the metal-walled airlock, Lucita clumping clumsily in boots that were far too large for her. Dan cycled the lock; the inner hatch closed, the air was pumped out and then the outer hatch slid open. They were not facing the Earth at the moment. All Dan could see were the unblinking pinpoint lights of the stars: the distant eyes of heaven watching him.

He heard Lucita gasp.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, reaching for her gloved hand. “I’m not afraid,” she replied. “It is so beautiful! It takes my breath away.”

He smiled inside his helmet and they stepped out into nothingness. Like a swimmer, Dan kicked away from the lip of the hatch, the broomstick in one hand and Lucita in the other. He helped her to get a firm grip on the broomstick, then flicked open the safety catch that protected against accidental ignition of the rocket motor at its far end.

Using the jetpack thrusters to maneuver, Dan turned himself and Lucita until they were facing the factory. Off in the distance it hung like a floating scrap heap, all angles and projections.

“To the Emerald City,” he muttered, and thumbed the ignition button. The rocket flared soundlessly and they were suddenly hurtling toward the space factory.

Malik crouched behind a flimsy partition, mentally ticking off ten seconds. The blast came at nine, loud and sharp as an unexpected clap of thunder.

He got to his feet as twenty armed soldiers rushed, yelling, into the smoke where the doors to the visitors lounge had been blown apart.

Gripping a machine pistol firmly in his right hand, Malik followed the soldiers. Their shouts died quickly. Waving at the lingering smoke as he entered the lounge, Malik saw that it was empty.