Austin Bargeta stammered through the emergency meeting. The corporate shareholders were as shocked after they had read the report as Austin had been. They adjourned, to meet again on the morrow. Austin was not there for the meeting. Immediately after the adjournment, he had taken a pistol from his private wallsafe. It was an antique 13mm caseless automatic, firing gunpowder-charged rounds, that had been in the family since the beginning. He had recently had shells custom-made. Now he pulled the slide back, and let it go forward, chambering a round. Turned the large pistol awkwardly, held it against his temple, thought at least the Bargetas had some honor, and pressed the trigger. The bullet blew most of the frontal half of his brain away. Unfortunately, it did not turn him into a corpse. Austin Bargeta, blind, mute, brain capable of only providing motor responses, lived on.
Kea Richards, from his self-exile on Ganymede, sent a shocked com. Could he help? He had some personal credits, and if they could be used to keep Austin from becoming a public ward, the family had but to ask. The family declined. Bankrupt they might have been—but they were not reduced to charity. Kea felt a flicker of regret—the bastard should have been a better shot.
Kea was revenged. As, he felt, were many, many others. His unknown mother, driven to the horrors of a longliner. His father and grandmother and the other citizens of Hilo, drowned because most likely whichever fat-cat company had been supposed to maintain the tidal barriers had cut corners on maintenance to fatten their coffers. Leong Suk, who had never had a chance to know anything but poverty, from her native Korea to Maui. Hell, even that poor sad bastard Tompkins, who surely deserved better than to spend his life as a crackpot down a filthy alley. All the bluecollars he had grown and lived with, who sweated, worked, and died, so that people named Bargeta could have trimarans on Mars. The spacemen who killed themselves with alk or died in industrial "accidents" because shipline owners had little interest in safety standards beyond the letter of the law. The Bargetas and their gutted conglomerate were on the first. There would be more. Many more.
Kea was ready to build his "weapons" for the takeover. Only one man had died when Deimos blew up. He was one of the blasters Richards had hired from Mars's underworld, a demo expert who evidently hadn't been as expert as he had bragged. All the others, scientists, machinists, support people, and their mates, had been evacked days earlier to Ganymede, where the real task would begin. Kea Richards was ready for his "wilderness years."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
KEA HAD GIVEN himself twenty years to reach a throne—a throne that he would have to create. But it didn't take him that long— everything went to lightspeed. Some of the acceleration was deliberate. Richards knew he had only so much time to establish a completely secure physical, moral, and economic stronghold before They would try to take it away from him. The "They" would include not just business tycoons and supercorporations, but planetary governments as well. So he moved very fast What little personal life and recreational time he'd had as Bargeta's troubleshooter appeared like a lifetime of idle luxury now.
At first, it seemed to everyone Kea Richards really had retired to piddle about on his vast Ganymede estates with scientific toys. What actually happened was that his starship was modified to accept AM2 for fuel. The "fuel tank" was no bigger than Richards's torso and was made of Imperium X, as were the feed lines and chambers in the engine itself. There had been a seemingly insurmountable problem keeping the engine lubricant from ever contacting Anti-Matter Two, but eventually the problem had been solved.
When all ground tests were completed satisfactorily, ^Richards and Doctor Masterson quietly boarded ship. Overhead, filling the sky, was the reddish bulk of Jupiter. Kea lifted the ship on McLean power, then went to Yukawa drive. Offworld, he checked the ship's ultrasensitive receptors. The ship was not being monitored. And then the ship went to stardrive. AM2 stardrive.
Nothing spectacular happened. Stardrive was stardrive was hyperspace was boring. Nothing was exciting about this test flight—except that the drive-activation control was closed, and drive automatically cut before Richards could take his hand from it. Arcturus's red-yellow bulk and its twelve worlds hung onscreen. Three other star systems were reached that E-night. And on return to Ganymede the fuel "tank" appeared to be as "full" as on departure.
Cost? Not calculable. The fuel was a bit of the small chunk "mined" by Kea beyond the Alva Sector. There was still three quarters of the debris left, held in an Imperium X vault on Ganymede. Now the dream was a reality. The ship was further modified, its hold gutted and lined with Imperium X.
Again, Kea vanished. Three E-months later he returned with a full cargo of AM2. That was enough Anti-Matter Two to provide energy, he calculated, for the entire career of every spaceship ever built, with enough left over—but this was on fairly shaky mathematics—to run all of Mars's power plants for three E-years. Sooner or later Kea knew he would have to build roboticized mining ships, everything in them either made of or plated with Imperium X, move them through the discontinuity into the other universe, and set them to work. He would also have to come up with some kind of long-distance on/off switch, a com whose signals would have to be at least as eccentrically targeted as Richards's chosen orbits to the Alva Sector.
Kea had studied, with some amusement, the attempts of the so-called oil sheikhs to use their control of the petroleum resource to reshape the culture of Earth. Perhaps admirable in its appalling egocentricity, the plan had of course failed in unreality, greed, and hypocrisy. If Kea had to play that card, however, he was determined it would be the highest of trumps. But the on/off power switch could wait. Now it was time to start rattling some cages.
Kea stepped out of retirement and announced plans to build luxury ships—spaceyachts, really—and run them from Earth to Mars as a first-class service. At a rumored price three times that of conventional passage. There was some quiet scoffing in the resorts, bars, and clubs catering to the gigawealthy. Nice thought, but there weren't that many superrich fools. Not enough to support Kea's scheme. Oh well. He would go bankrupt, and come looking to them for a position, which any of them would be happy to provide.
The ships were built. They looked to be more medium-size freighters than luxury carriers. And back of Barrier Thirty-three, some compartments were left empty. Modifications would be made on Ganymede. Kea had some odd ideas of his own, which would be made at the small port on his estates. On Ganymede, the ships were fitted with stardrive engines. Fueled. And crewed.
Since no one gave a diddly damn about spacemen, no one had noticed that recruiters had been filtering through spaceports. Looking for the best, those who hadn't lost their illusions and those who looked to the stars as a challenge, not a swamper's scut job. Those who passed the amazingly stringent tests were brought to Ganymede and trained. Surprisingly, about 15 percent were paid off and regretfully returned to their home worlds— psychologists discovered that even a spaceman might be afraid of the stars beyond the "known" worlds. Eventually the men and women were shown the new ships. Taught to navigate, pilot, and service them. And sent out. To the stars. Looking. For valuables. And for extraterrestrials.
Two years after Kea had launched the first starship, seven intelligent—human or near-human equivalent as a minimum— extraterrestrial races had been found. Three of them were evolved enough to have interplanetary travel. None had stardrive. They would. On Kea Richards's terms.