Jonathan Wilson Hazard, captain, U.S. Navy (ret.). Marital status: divorced. Two children: Jonathan, Jr., twenty-six; Virginia Elizabeth, twenty. Served twenty-eight years in U.S. Navy, mostly in submarines. Commanded fleet ballistic-missile submarines Ohio, Corpus Christi, and Utah. Later served as technical advisor to Joint Chiefs of Staff and as naval liaison to NATO headquarters in Brussels. Retired from Navy after hostage crisis in Brussels. Joined International Peacekeeping Force and appointed commander of orbital battle station Hunter.
«I can’t just hand this station over to a face on a screen,» Hazard replied, stalling, desperately trying to think his way through the situation. «I don’t know what you’re up to, what your intentions are, who you really are.»
«You’re in no position to bargain, Hazard,» said Buckbee, his voice flat and hard. «We want control of your station. Either you give it to us or we’ll eliminate you completely.»
«Who the hell is ‘we’?»
«That doesn’t matter.»
«The hell it doesn’t! I want to know who you are and what you’re up to.»
Buckbee frowned. His eyes shifted away slightly, as if looking to someone standing out of range of the video camera.
«We don’t have time to go into that now,» he said at last.
Hazard recognized the crack in Buckbee’s armor. It was not much, but he pressed it. «Well, you goddamned well better make time, mister. I’m not handing this station over to you or anybody else until I know what in hell is going on.»
Turning to Feeney, he ordered, «Sound general quarters. ABM satellites on full automatic. Miss Yang, contact IPF headquarters and give them a full report of our situation.»
«We’ll destroy your station before those idiots in Geneva can decide what to do!» Buckbee snapped.
«Maybe,» said Hazard. «But that’ll take time, won’t it? And we won’t go down easy, I guarantee you. Maybe we’ll take you down with us.»
Buckbee’s face went white with fury. His eyes glared angrily.
«Listen,» Hazard said more reasonably, «you can’t expect me to just turn this station over to a face on a screen. Six of my people have been killed. I want to know why, and who’s behind all this. I won’t deal until I know who I’m dealing with and what your intentions are.»
Buckbee growled, «You’ve just signed the death warrant for yourself and your entire crew.»
The comm screen went blank.
For a moment Hazard hung weightlessly before the dead screen, struggling to keep the fear inside him from showing. Putting a hand out to the edge of the console to steady himself, he turned slowly to his young officers. Their eyes were riveted on him, waiting for him to tell them what to do, waiting for him to decide between life and death.
Quietly, but with steel in his voice, Hazard commanded, «I said general quarters, Mr. Feeney. Now!»
Feeney flinched as if suddenly awakened from a dream. He pushed himself to the command console, unlatched the red cover over the «general quarters» button, and banged it eagerly with his fist. The action sent him recoiling upward and he had to put up a hand against the overhead to push himself back down to the deck. The alarm light began blinking red and they could hear its hooting even through the airtight hatches outside the CIC.
«Geneva, Miss Yang,» Hazard said sternly, over the howl of the alarm. «Feeney, see that the crew is at their battle stations. I want the satellites under our control on full automatic, prepared to shoot down anything that moves if it isn’t in our precleared data bank. And Mr. Varshni, has that damage-control party gotten under way yet?»
The two young men rushed toward the hatch, bumping each other in their eagerness to follow their commander’s orders. Hazard almost smiled at the Laurel-and-Hardy aspect of it. Lieutenant Yang pushed herself to the comm console and anchored her softboots on the Velcro strip fastened to the deck there.
«Miss Stromsen, you are the duty officer. I am depending on you to keep me informed of the status of all systems.»
«Yes, sir!»
Keep them busy, Hazard told himself. Make them concentrate on doing their jobs and they won’t have time to be frightened.
«Encountering interference, sir,» reported Yang, her eyes on the comm displays. «Switching to emergency frequency.»
Jamming, thought Hazard.
«Main comm antenna overheating,» Stromsen said. She glanced down at her console keyboard, then up at the displays again. «I think they’re attacking the antennas with lasers, sir. Main antenna out. Secondaries …» She shrugged and gestured toward the baleful red lights strung across her keyboard. «They’re all out, sir.»
«Set up a laser link,» Hazard commanded. «They can’t jam that. We’ve got to let Geneva know what’s happening.»
«Sir,» said Yang, «Geneva will not be within our horizon for another forty-three minutes.»
«Try signaling the commsats. Topmost priority.»
«Yes, sir.»
Got to let Geneva know, Hazard repeated to himself. If anybody can help us, they can. If Buckbee’s pals haven’t put one of their own people into the comm center down there. Or staged a coup. Or already knocked out the commsats. They’ve been planning this for a long time. They’ve got it all timed down to the microsecond.
He remembered the dinner, a month earlier, the night before he left to take command of the Hunter. I’ve known about it since then, Hazard said to himself. Known about it but didn’t want to believe it. Known about it and done nothing. Buckbee was right. I killed those six kids. I should have seen that the bastards would strike without warning.
It had been in the equatorial city of Belém, where the Brazilians had set up their space launching facility. The IPF was obligated to spread its launches among all its space-capable member nations, so Hazard had been ordered to assemble his crew at Belém for their lift into orbit.
The night before they left, Hazard had been invited to dinner by an old Navy acquaintance who had already put in three months of orbital duty with the Peacekeepers and was on Earthside leave.
His name was Cardillo. Hazard had known him, somewhat distantly, as a fellow submariner, commander of attack boats rather than the missile carriers Hazard himself had captained. Vincent Cardillo had a reputation for being a hard nose who ran an efficient boat, if not a particularly happy one. He had never been really close to Hazard: their chemistries were too different. But this specific sweltering evening in a poorly air-conditioned restaurant in downtown Belém, Cardillo acted as if they shared some old fraternal secret between them.
Hazard had worn his IPF summerweight uniform: pale blue with gold insignia bordered by space black. Cardillo came in casual civilian slacks and a beautifully tailored Italian silk jacket. Through drinks and the first part of the dinner their conversation was light, inconsequential. Mostly reminiscences by two gray-haired submariners about men they had known, women they had chased, sea tales that grew with each retelling. But then:
«Damn shame,» Cardillo muttered, halfway through his entree of grilled eel.
The restaurant, one of the hundreds that had sprung up in Belém since the Brazilians had made the city their major spaceport, was on the waterfront. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the muddy Para River widened into the huge bay that eventually fed into the Atlantic. Hazard had spent his last day on Earth touring around the tropical jungle on a riverboat. The makeshift shanties that stood on stilts along the twisting mud-brown creeks were giving way to industrial parks and cinderblock housing developments. Air-conditioning was transforming the region from rubber plantations to computerized information services. The smell of cement dust blotted out the fragrance of tropical flowers. Bulldozers clattered in raw clearings slashed from the forest where stark steel frameworks of new buildings rose above the jungle growth. Children who had splashed naked in the brown jungle streams were being rounded up and sent to air-conditioned schools.