Once he saw that the crew members were well settled, he picked up the intercom and ordered his leaders to assemble in a meeting room in five minutes. From the few dozen pirates left, he had hand-selected five competent leaders to be his lieutenants: Gebbeth, Crass, Lather, Bolcher, and Slant.
In less than that time, Lurton Zimbardo was sitting at a table with the five other men. All but Zimbardo looked haggard. The pirates were demoralized and upset. Victory on Mars and beyond had been within their grasp, but it had all been blundered away. A band of several hundred men who had planned and worked for several years had been reduced to a few dozen. Their dreams of power and prominence, shaped and fueled by their captain Troy Putnam, had been utterly destroyed. Now Putnam was in custody on Mars, along with the rest of the pirates who had been captured by Earth’s forces.
“Troy Putnam was a fool,” Zimbardo announced in a quiet voice edged with steel. “His plan might have worked—might have worked, if I had had more part in planning—but he was no more than a conceited ignoramus! The Starmen walked in on him and took him completely by surprise! I can just imagine how his face must have looked as he realized his plan was over and he was led off to jail. A fool! We are better off without him!”
“Better off without him?” asked one man in a dull voice. “What do you mean, Lurton? Better off for what?”
“Don’t be a fool yourself, Crass!” Zimbardo sneered. “You think we’re finished here? We will still get what we want and it won’t be very difficult! We don’t need Putnam and we don’t need a few hundred men, either! You can be thankful you’re here instead of locked in a stone room in Eagle City eating square, plain, healthy meals off of a metal tray! The collapse of Putnam’s big dream is the best thing that could have happened for us!”
A muscular, unsmiling man on Zimbardo’s right swung his gaze to the speaker. “It sounds as if you have a plan, Mr. Zimbardo.” The man was in his early thirties and resembled a street fighter. His carefully combed dark hair made him look almost strikingly handsome, but his eyes were black and humorless.
Zimbardo turned toward the man. “Yes, I have a plan. You, Gebbeth, will be my chief assistant and the pilot of the Tartarus, my personal ship. I can depend on you. Space Command’s celebration on Mars will be extremely short-lived.”
“You were always the strong one, Lurton,” said another. “I kind of always figured you for the real leader, and I always wished it was you instead of Putnam.”
“Now you got your wish, Bolcher. I’ve taken charge. I’m moving this asteroid out of its orbit into a place outside the Belt. Here’s my plan.”
Almost an hour later, the men left the meeting room, smiling, joking, and stepping lightly. Their fatigue was gone, their discouragement forgotten.