There was the usual brief disorientation, the transient nausea and, for Grimes at least, a flash of prevision.
He saw, as plainly as if she had been standing there in person, one of his fellow privateers, Captain Agatha Prinn of the star tramp Agatha’s Ark. She was dressed—how else?—in her uniform of severely cut, short-skirted business suit, gray, with minimal trimmings of gold braid. She was holding a paper bag. She dropped it. It burst when it hit the ground, releasing a cloud of fine, white powder. . . .
Colors, perspective and sounds snapped back to normal.
Grimes blinked, found that he was staring out of a viewport to an interstellar night in which the stars were no longer bright points of unwinking light but were amorphous nebulae.
Agatha Prinn and a flour bomb! he wondered. What the hell was all that about?
He realized that Captain Harringby was addressing him.
“Your Excellency,” (but that’s me! thought Grimes) “we are now on trajectory. Would you care to join me for liquid refreshment before lunch?”
It would make the old bastard’s day if I said no, Grimes told himself.
“Thank you, Captain,” he said as he unbuckled himself from his seat.
Chapter 6
It was a peculiar voyage, not altogether unpleasant, with its mixture of ostracism and adulation and downright pampering. Governor Grimes took his meals at the captain’s table—and Captain Harringby, presiding over this lavish board, accorded the governor the respect due to him while making it plain that he did not approve of Commodore Grimes, the pirate chief. Now and again he permitted himself a flash of unkind humor, such as when the wine stewardess was dispensing a vintage Burgundy to accompany the roast beef. “I suppose, Your Excellency, that you must, now and again, have acquired some very fine wines among your other . . . er . . . loot?”
“The Hallichecki,” Grimes had replied stiffly, “do not use alcohol.” He added, after sipping from his glass, “My privateering operations were against the shipping of the Hegemony.”
“But didn’t you seize a Terran ship? One of the Commission’s liners?”
“That happened after a mutiny, Captain. It all came out at the Court of Inquiry.” He added, “And, in any case, the attempted piracy was unsuccessful.”
The others at the table were looking at him, some with disapproval and contempt, others with what was almost admiration. There was the fat Joachim Levy, one of the Dog Star Line’s managers taking his Long Service Leave and bound for New Venusberg. He pursed his thick lips, then said, “Our ships are used to coping with piracy. When necessary they are armed—and their crews know how to use their weapons.”
“I know,” Grimes told him. “My Mate was ex-Dog Star Line. He was a very good gunnery officer.”
Levy scowled and the plump, artificially blonde Mrs. Levy laughed. “So all the drills that the Dog Star Line officers have to go through are some use after all!” She smiled quite prettily at Grimes. “But wasn’t it fun, Your Excellency? Sailing the seas of space with the Jolly Roger at the masthead and a cutlass clenched between your teeth?”
“Mphm,” grunted Grimes.
“In the good old days,” said Ivor Sandorsen, who was a Lloyd’s underwriter, “you would have been hanged from your own yardarm, Your Excellency.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Grimes, “one of my ancestors was.”
“Thus establishing a precedent.”
“Another, better-known, pirate,” said Grimes, “established another precedent. Sir Henry Morgan. He became a governor.”
“Had Lloyd’s been in existence in those days, sir, he would have paid the just penalty for his crimes.”
“In any case,” said Harringby with a superior smile, “I think that His Excellency will admit that the governorship of Liberia is hardly a plum as such appointments go. More of a rotten apple, perhaps.”
“Have you been there, Captain?” asked Mrs. Levy, who seemed to have appointed herself Grimes’s champion.
“No, madam. Nor do I want to. I shall place my ship in orbit about that world and a tender will rendezvous to pick up His Excellency. Then I shall be on my way.”
“Rejoicing?” asked Grimes.
“I shall most certainly not be weeping.”
“And you, Your Excellency,” asked Dorothea Taine, tall, dark, intense, author of a best seller which Grimes’s father had scornfully dismissed as Womens’ Weekly rubbish, “will you be weeping or rejoicing?”
“That remains to be seen,” Grimes told her.
* * *
“Sir—Your Excellency, I mean—what’s it really like being a pirate? Sorry. A privateer. . . .” The young Fifth Officer made his diffident approach to Grimes as he was just dismounting from one of the exercise bicycles in the liner’s gymnasium.
“There are better and safer ways of earning a living,” Grimes said.
“Safer, perhaps, sir. But . . . Would you know if Commodore Kane is still trying to find volunteers for his privateer fleet?”
“Drongo Kane is better stayed away from. In any case, as you must have heard, the Survey Service is smacking down on all privateering operations.”
“Mr. Barray!” The Chief Officer had just come into the gymnasium for his own exercise session. “Here you are. I thought that you were supposed to be checking the equipment in your lifeboat.”
“I . . . I’ve finished that, sir. It’s all in order.”
“Then find Mr. McGurr and lend him a hand in hydroponics. This is his tank cleaning day.”
Crestfallen, the young man left the gym. Shedding his robe and, clad only in trunks, the Chief Officer mounted the bicycle that Grimes had vacated. As he started to pedal he said, “Even you, Your Excellency, must know that young men often evince enthusiasm for the most unworthy people and causes.”
“Are you implying that I’m unworthy, Mr. Kelner?”
“I never said so, Your Excellency.”
“I can use you, Your Excellency. Or may I call you John? After all, I know your father; I’ve met him at Australian Society of Authors meetings . . .”
Grimes looked at Dorothea Taine over his coffee cup. He was taking this midmorning refreshment in the lounge; he did not see why he should be confined to his quarters, luxurious though they were, even though he was something of a social leper.
“Use me?” he asked.
The writer smiled. Her teeth were too large for her small mouth. The heavy-rimmed spectacles that she affected made her big, black eyes look even bigger in her sallow face.
“I want to use you . . . John.”
“How, Ms. Taine?” asked Grimes dubiously.
“Dorothea, please. Or you may call me Dot. I’m starting a new novel. One of those If stories. If Dampier, the buccaneer and privateer, had established a settlement on the West Coast of Australia, long before the one was established at Botany Bay. After all, he was there. . . .”
“And he didn’t think much of it.”
“But something could, just could, have made him change his mind. He could have fallen madly in love with a beautiful Aboriginal girl. Perhaps she could have saved his life, just as the Princess Pocahontas saved the life of Captain John Smith in Virginia . . .”
Grimes entertained a fleeting vision of a naked black girl getting in the way of a boomerang flung at the piratical Captain Dampier by her irate father.
“Mphm,” he grunted around the stem of his pipe.
“You see, John, I want to make Dampier a real character. I can’t go back in time to meet him. But there’s one real life character, aboard this very ship, who could serve as a model. You. Dampier wasn’t only a pirate and privateer, he was also an officer, a captain, in the Royal Navy. You’ve been a privateer and a pirate—and also an officer, commanding ships, in the Survey Service . . . If I could only get inside you . . .”
I don’t want to get inside you, thought Grimes unkindly. You’re too skinny, for a start. And you gush.
“Perhaps some evening, or evenings, after dinner . . . We could get aw
ay by ourselves somewhere and you could tell me all about yourself . . .”
“It would be very boring for you,” said Grimes.
“It would not, John. It couldn’t possibly be.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her, “but all my evenings are fully taken up. I’ve all the spools on Liberia to study. After all, I’m being paid to be governor of the damn place so I’d better know something about it before I get there. . . .”
* * *
“Do you mind if I join you, Your Excellency? Joe’s gotten himself involved in a non-stop poker game and I’m just a bit lonesome.”
“Please do, Mrs. Levy. What are you drinking? A Black Angel?” Then, to the bar stewardess, “Another pink gin, please, and a B.A.”
“I like this little bar. . . . Your very good health, Excellency.”
“And yours, Mrs. Levy.”
“That sounds dreadfully formal.”
“Vee, then.”
“Only Joe calls me that. I prefer Vera.”
“Your very good health, Vera.”
“I only found this little bar a couple of days ago, John. (Do you mind?) It’s so . . . private. Not like the main bars, always crowded and always that so-called music so that you can’t hear yourself think. I guess that there’re still parts of this big ship that I haven’t seen. We—the Dog Star Line, that is—don’t have anything in this class.”
“But you are getting into the passenger trades.”
“Glorified cattle boats,” she sneered. “Nothing like this. But I don’t suppose that Joe will ever be important enough to qualify for the VIP suite. I would so like to see how the VIPs live. . . .”
“I must throw an official cocktail party before we get to Liberia,” said Grimes. “You’re invited, of course. . . .”
After all, he thought, I might want a job in the Dog Star Line some day. Mr. Levy, for all his apparent inattention to his wife, looked as though he might prove to be a very jealous husband. . . .
“Never mind,” she said with sudden coldness. “I’ll just take my place in the queue. Goodnight, Your Excellency.”
She finished her drink and left—and Grimes knew that he would never be employed by the Dog Star Line as long as she was the wife of one of that company’s managers.
“Satisfied?” he asked sleepily.
“Yes . . . and no, darling. But we’ve several hours before Jane brings in your morning tea.”
“You’d better be out of here before then, Liz.”
“It’s not important really. We tabbies stick together, even though some of us have gold braid on our shoulders and some haven’t. Jane would never run screaming to old Herring.”
“Herring?”
“Captain Harringby. Haven’t you ever noticed the fishlike look he has sometimes?”
“What if he did find out? What would he do?”
“Nothing, darling. Nothing. He’s all show and no blow. Like practically every other passenger ship master he’s scared shitless of the Space Catering Officers and Stewardesses’ Guild. We have the power to make any voyage a hell for all concerned.”
“Mphm.”
No matter how successful I am, he thought, I shall never be fool enough to buy a big passenger ship.
He persisted, “But you didn’t answer my question properly . . .”
“About being satisfied? Well, you aren’t exactly bad in bed, although you could be better. But I’ll educate you, darling. What satisfies me is that I’ve won the sweep.”
“The sweep?”
“Yes. We all put in twenty credits and the prize goes to the first member of Sobraon’s female staff to go to bed with the notorious pirate. You. And I get the prize.”
“So that’s why the purser brought up my supper tray in person tonight instead of entrusting the task to one of her underlings! All right, Liz. You’ve won. But it’s been touch and go.” He laughed. “I wondered why my personal needs were being attended to by different stewardesses every day and night. A fair go for all, I suppose. I almost succumbed this morning when that little carroty cat . . .”
“Sue . . .”
“. . . intimated that she’d just love to wash my back while I was taking my shower.”
“And now I’ll rub your front and hope that you’ll rise to the occasion.”
Chapter 7
Sobraon was in orbit about Liberia.
Alongside her was one of that planet’s meteorological satellite tenders, airlock to airlock and with the short gangway tube sealed in place, a means of transfer of personnel from spaceship to spaceship with which Grimes was unfamiliar. In the Survey Service spacesuits and lifelines were good enough for anybody, from admirals down. But now he was no longer a spaceman. He was a first-class passenger. And he was a governor.
He was dressed as such, in the archaic finery that must always have seemed absurd to any intelligent human being, a rig neither functional nor aesthetically pleasing. Starched white shirt, stiff collar and gray silk cravat . . . Black tailcoat over a gray waistcoat . . . Gray, sharply creased trousers . . . Highly polished black boots . . . And—horror of horrors!—a gray silk top hat.
He stood in the vestibule of the liner’s airlock; at least Harringby had put the inertial drive back into operation so that Grimes was spared the indignity of floundering about clumsily in his hampering clothing. Nonetheless he was sweating, his shirt damp on his chest, sides and back. He derived some small pleasure from the observation that Captain Harringby was far from comfortable in his own dress uniform; obviously it had been tailored for him before he started to put on weight. The Chief Officer’s black-and-gold finery fitted him well enough but his expression made it plain that he hated having to wear it. Liz, the Purser, carried her full dress far better than did the Captain and the Mate. She looked cool and elegant in her long, black skirt, her white blouse with the floppy black tie, her short, gold-trimmed jacket.
Also present were the Third Officer, who would be looking after the airlock, and two Cadets. The young men were comfortable in normal shirt-and-shorts rig. Grimes envied them.
Harringby saluted stiffly. Grimes raised his top hat. Harringby extended his hand. Grimes took it with deliberate and (he hoped) infuriating graciousness.
“Good-bye, Your Excellency,” said the shipmaster. “It’s been both an honor and a pleasure to have you aboard.”
Bloody liar, thought Grimes. He said, “Thank you, Captain.”
The Chief Officer saluted, waited until Grimes extended his hand before offering his own.
“The best of luck, Your Excellency.”
Do you mean it? wondered Grimes.
Liz brought her slim hand up to the brim of her tricorne hat, then held it out to Grimes who, gallantly, raised it to his lips while bowing slightly. Harringby scowled and the Chief Officer smirked dirtily. Grimes straightened up, still holding the girl’s hand, looking into her eyes. He would have liked to have kissed those full lips—and to hell with Harringby!—but he and Liz had said their proper (improper?) good-byes during the night and early morning ship’s time.
“Good-bye, Your Excellency,” she murmured. “And—look after yourself.”
“I’ll try to,” he promised.
Harringby coughed loudly to attract attention, then said, “Your Excellency, I shall be vastly obliged if you will board the tender. It is time that I was getting back to my control room.”
“Very well, Captain.”
Grimes gave one last squeeze to Liz’s hand, relinquished it reluctantly and turned to walk into the airlock chamber and then through the short connecting tube. The tender’s airlock door was smaller than that of the liner and had not been designed to admit anybody wearing a top hat. That ceremonial headgear was knocked off its insecure perch. As Grimes stooped to retrieve it he heard the Chief Officer laugh and an even louder guffaw from one of the tender’s crew. He carried his hat before him as he completed his journey to the small spacecraft’s cabin. His prominent ears were burning furiously.
The crew of the t
ender—Liberia possessed only orbital spacecraft—were young, reasonably efficient and (to Grimes’s great envy) sensibly uniformed in shorts and T-shirts and badges of rank pinned to the left breast. The Captain asked Grimes to join him in the control cab. He did so, after removing his tail coat and waistcoat, sat down in the copilot’s chair. He looked out from the viewport at the great bulk of the liner, already fast diminishing against the backdrop of abysmal night and stars, saw it flicker and fade and vanish as the Mannschenn Drive was actuated. He transferred his attention to the mottled sphere toward which the tender was dropping—pearly cloud systems and blue seas, brown and green continents and islands.
“It’s a good world, Your Excellency,” said the young pilot. He grinned wryly. “It was a good world. It could be one again.”
Grimes looked at him with some curiosity. The accent had been Standard English, overlaid with an oddly musical quality. The face was olive-skinned, hawklike. Native-born, he thought. The original colonists—those romantic Anarchists—had been largely of Latin-American stock.
“Could be?” he asked.
“That is the opinion of some of us, Your Excellency. And we’ve heard of you, of course. You’re something of an Anarchist yourself . . .”
“Mphm?”
“I mean. . . . You’re not the usual Survey Service stuffed shirt.”
“A stuffed shirt is just what I feel like at the moment.”
“But you’ve a reputation, sir, for doing things your own way.”
“And where has it got me?” asked Grimes, addressing the question to himself rather than to the tender’s pilot.
“You’ve commanded ships, sir. Real ships, deep space ships, not . . . tenders.”
“Don’t speak ill of your own command,” Grimes admonished.
The young man grinned whitely. “Oh, I like her. She’ll do almost anything I ask of her—but if I asked her to make a deep space voyage I know what her answer would be!”
“Fit her out with Mannschenn Drive and a life support system,” said Grimes, “and you could take her anywhere.”
Ride the Star Winds Page 3