Ben Bova - Empire Builders

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EMPIRE
BUILDERS
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TOR BOOKS BY BEN BOVA
As on a Darkling Plain
The Astral Mirror
Battle Station
The Best of the Nebulas (ed.)
Challenges
Colony
Cyberbooks
Escape Plus
Future Crime
Gremlins Go Home (with Gordon R. Dickson)
The Kinsman Saga
The Multiple Man
Orion
Orion in the Dying Time
Out of the Sun
Peacekeepers
Privateers
Prometheans
Star Peace: Assured Survival
The Starcrossed
Test of Fire
To Save the Sun (with A. J. Austin)
The Trikon Deception (with Bill Pogue)
Triumph
Vengeance of Orion
Voyagers
Voyagers Il: The Alien Within
Voyagers III: Star Brothers
The Winds of Altair
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BEN BOVA
IVIPIRE
BUILDERS
A TORN DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK ·NEW YORK
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in
this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events
is purely coincidental.
EMPIRE BUILDERS
Copyright © 1993 by Ben Bova
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or
portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
A Tor Book
Published by Torn Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
Tot®is a registered trademark of Torn Doherty Associates, Inc.
Design by Lynn Newmark
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bova, Ben.
Empire builders / Ben Bova.
p. cm.
Sequel to: Privateers.
ISBN 0312851049
I. Title.
3552.O84E48 I993
813'.54--dc20
93-21613
CIP
First edition: September 1993
Printed in the United States of America
0987654321
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To Robin and Mike Putira
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EMPIRE
BUILDERS
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"I DON'T WANT your crappy little company!" said Clan Randolph.
"The hell you don't!" Willard Mitchell snapped. Clan gave a disgusted snort and leaned back in the
stiff unpadded
chair. Mitchell glared across the table at him. The two lawyers,
seated beside their clients, shifted uneasily in their chairs.
The room was windowless, deep underground, without even a
video screen on the wall. Just bare lunar concrete lit by glareless
fluorescents set behind the ceiling panels. Technically, the chamber
was not a cell or even an interrogation chamber. It was a conference
room where defendants could meet in private with their lawyers.
Clan Randolph fished a small oblong plastic box from his inside
tunic pocket. About the size of his palm, it was a flat gray color with
a single row of tiny winking lights set across its face. All the lights
were green.
"No bugs in here," he muttered, adding silently to himself, At
least none that this little snooper can sniff out.
He slipped the detector back into his pocket and turned his gaze
again to Mitchell, still glaring at him from across the wobbly conference
table. Randolph was on the small side, but solidly built, a
welterweight with sandy hair that was turning gray at the temples.
He had a pugilist's face: strong square stubborn jaw, a nose that had
been slightly flattened by someone's fist a long time ago. But his
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10
BEN BOVA
light gray eyes glinted with a secret amusement, as if he were
inwardly laughing at the foolishness of men, himself included.
Across the table from him Willard Mitchell was scowling
grimly. Once he had been lean and athletic, a polo champion at
Princeton, a well-known young yachtsman. But years of living in the
Moon's easy gravity had softened him. Now he appeared older than
Randolph, bald pate gleaming with perspiration, badly overweight
and overwrought. Like Randolph, he was wearing business clothes:
a collarless waist-length tunic and matching slacks. But where Dan's
suit of sky blue looked trim and new, Mitchell's pearl gray outfit was
baggy, wrinkled, rumpled; stains of sweat darkened his armpits.
"This is all your doing, Randolph," he snarled in a heavy grating
voice. "Don't think I don't know that you set me up."
Clan raised his eyes to the glowing ceiling panels. "Lord spare
me from my friends," he said to the air. "I can protect myself from
my enemies."
Mitchell's lawyer, a sallow-skinned old man with the build and
demeanor of a cadaver, dressed in a blue so deep it looked almost
black, leaned toward his client and whispered something that Clan
could not hear.
Mitchell scowled at his lawyer, but turned back to Clan and
grumbled, "All right, all right, as long as we're stuck here what's
your offer?"
Mitchell was on trial before the Global Economic Council's lunar
tribunal for illegally exceeding his allotted quota of lunar ores. He
was guilty. He knew it, his lawyers knew it, and the tribunal had the
evidence to prove it. The fine that the tribunal was about to assess
would bankrupt him.
Clan Randolph leaned both elbows on the rickety table and
hunched forward in his chair. "First off," he said, his voice crisp with
suppressed anger, "I did not set you up."
"The hell you say."
"Goddammit to hell and back! The day I turn anybody over to
the GEC will be two weeks after the end of the world. If I wanted
to grab your pissant little outfit I would've done it myself. I don't
need the double-damned GEC to help me."
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EMPIRE BUILDERS 11
Mitchell fumed visibly, but held back from answering.
Randolph's lawyer, a strikingly red-haired young woman new
to the Moon, was sitting attentively at her boss's left. She said
mildly, "Mr. Mitchell has asked to hear your offer, Clan."
He grinned at her. "Yeah. Right."
"So7" Mitchell growled.
Randolph spread his hands. "I'll buy your stock at the current
market price--"
"Which is forty percent below par because of this lawsuit."
"--and pay the fine that the GEC's going to sock you with. You
continue to operate the company; you remain CEO and COO. You
can buy back your shares at market value whenever you want to."
Mitchell sank back in his chair, the expression on his fleshy face
somewhere between suspicion and hope. "Now, wait a minute," he
said. "You buy my shares-"
"All your shares," said Randolph. "Sixty-three percent of the
total outstanding, so I'm told."
The other man nodded. "You buy the shares. You pay the fine.
I stay in charge of the company. And then I can buy the shares backT"
Randolph gave him a crooked grin. "The harder you work, the
more the shares'il be worth."
"Suppose I let the company go to the dogs and leave you
holding the bagT"
Randolph shrugged. "That's the risk I take. But I don't see you
shitting on your own baby."
Mitchell glanced at his lawyer, who remained deadpan, then
turned back to Randolph. "I don't get it. What's in it for you7"
Dan's smile turned dazzling. "A chance to shaft Malik and his
double-damned GEC. What elseT"
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DANIEL HAMILTON RANDOLPH was the richest human being
living off-Earth. While there was no dearth of suspicious souls who
were convinced that no one could get that filthy rich while staying
entirely within the law, for the most part Clan Randolph had earned
his wealth legally.
Once, briefly, he had been accused of piracy. By Vasily Malik,
who had then been director of the Russian Federation's space program. Clan had evaded the charges
against him, married the Venezuelan
woman Malik was engaged to, and personally broken the
Russian's jaw, together with a knuckle of his own right hand.
Now, ten years later, Dan's marriage had long since ended in
divorce. The woman he had loved, the woman who had thought she
loved him, was now Malik's wife. And Malik himself had survived
the turmoil and treachery in the Kremlin to become the new Russian
Federation's representative on the Global Economic Council.
In the middle of the twenty-first century, space was becoming
vitally important to the Earth's global economy. Even the United
States, which had abandoned its space program decades earlier, was
now building factories in orbit and allowing its citizens to operate
mining facilities on the Moon. Under GEC supervision, of course.
The GEC had legal control of all extraterrestrial operations, from the
teams of explorers combing the rusted sands of Mars to the hordes
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