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

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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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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Ben Bova - Empire Builders

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