“Yair. Could be. But I’m glad it’s not me that has ter fix the beacon.”
“Somebody has to,” said Farrell virtuously.
Star Pioneer was on her way once more, driving along the trajectory between Wyong and Esquel, her inertial drive maintaining a normal one standard gravity acceleration, her Mannschenn Drive set for cruising temporal precession rate. Farrell had discussed matters with Grimes and Sonya and with his own senior officers. All agreed that there was no need for urgency; the Esquel beacon was not an essential navigational aid in this sector of space; had it been so it would have been manned.
There was, of course, no communication with the world toward which the ship was bound. The Carlotti beacons are, of course, used for faster-than-light radio communication between distant ships and planets, but the one on Esquel was a direction finding device only. A team of skilled technicians could have made short work of a conversion job, rendering the beacon capable of the transmission and reception of FTL radio signals—but there were no human technicians on Esquel. Yet. Imperialism has long been a dirty word; but the idea persists even though it is never vocalized. The Carlotti beacon on Esquel was the thin end of the wedge, the foot inside the door. Sooner or later the Esquelian rulers would come to rely upon that income derived from the rental of the beacon site, the imports (mainly luxuries) that they could buy with it; and then, not blatantly but most definitely, yet another planet would be absorbed into the Federation’s economic empire.
There was conventional radio on Esquel, but Star Pioneer would not be able to pick up any messages while her time and space warping interstellar drive was in operation, and not until she was within spitting distance of the planet. There were almost certainly at least a few Esquelian telepaths—but the Survey Service ship was without a psionic radio officer. One should have been carried; one had been carried, in fact, but she had engineered her discharge on Glebe, where she had become wildly enamored of a wealthy grazier. Farrell had let her go; now he was rather wishing that he had not done so.
The Pioneer fell down the dark dimensions between the stars, and life aboard her was normal enough. There was no hurry. Unmanned beacons had broken down before, would do so again. Meanwhile there was the pleasant routine of a ship of war in deep space, the regular meals, the card-playing, the chess and what few games of a more physically demanding nature were possible in the rather cramped conditions. Sonya was enjoying it, Grimes was not. He had been too long away from the spit and polish of the Survey Service. And Farrell—unwisely for one in his position—was starting to take sides. Sonya, he not very subtly insinuated, was his breed of cat. Grimes might have been once, but he was no longer. Not only had he resigned from the finest body of astronauts in the galaxy, known or unknown, but he had slammed the door behind him. And as for this craze of his for—of all things!—seamanship . . . Grimes was pained, but not surprised, when Sonya told him, one night, that aboard this ship he was known as the Ancient Mariner.
Ahead, the Esquel sun burgeoned; and then came the day, the hour and the minute when the Mannschenn Drive was shut down and the ship reemerged into the normal continuum. She was still some weeks from Esquel itself, hut she was in no hurry—until the first messages started coming in.
Grimes sat with Sonya and Farrell in the control room. He listened to the squeaky voice issuing from the transceiver. “Calling Earth ship . . . Calling any Earth ship . . . Help . . . Help . . . Help . . .”
It went on and on without break, although it was obvious that a succession of operators was working a more or less regular system of reliefs at the microphone. Farrel acknowledged. It would be minutes before the radio waves carrying his voice reached the Esquelian receiver, more minutes for a reply to come back. He said, as they were waiting for this, that he hoped that whoever was making the distress call had more than one transceiver in operation.
Abruptly the gibbering plea for unspecified aid ceased. A new voice came on the speaker. “I talk for Cabarar, High King of Esquel. There has been . . . revolution. We are . . . besieged on Drarg Island. Cannot hold out . . . much longer. Help. You must . . . help.”
There was a long silence, broken by Farrell. “Number One,” he ordered, “maximum thrust.”
“Maximum thrust, sir.” Then, into the intercom, “All hands to acceleration couches! Maximum thrust!”
The backs of the control room chairs fell to the horizontal, the leg rests lifted. The irregular beat of the inertial drive quickened, maddening in its noisy nonrhythm. Acceleration stamped frail human bodies deep into the resilient padding of the couches.
I’m getting too old for this sort of thing, thought Grimes. But he retained his keen interest in all that was going on about him. He heard Farrell say, every word an effort, “Pilot . . . Give me . . . data . . . on . . . Drarg . . .”
“Data . . . on . . . Drarg . . . sir . . .” replied the Navigator.
From the corner of his eye Grimes could see the young officer stretched supine on his couch, saw the fingers of his right hand crawling among the buttons in the arm rest like crippled white worms. A screen came into being overhead, a Mercator map of Esquel, with the greens and yellows and browns of sprawling continents, the oceanic blue. The map expanded; it was as though a television camera was falling rapidly to a position roughly in the middle of one of the seas. There was a speck there in the blueness. It expanded, but not to any extent. It was obvious that Drarg was only a very small island.
The map was succeeded by pictorial representations of the beacon station. There were high, rugged cliffs, with the sea foaming angrily through the jagged rocks at the water-line. There was a short, spidery jetty. And, over all, was the slowly rotating antenna of the Carlotti beacon, an ellipsoid Mobius strip that seemed ever on the point of vanishment as it turned about its long axis, stark yet insubstantial against the stormy sky.
Farrell, speaking a little more easily now, said, “There’s room on that plateau to land a boat—but to put the ship down is out of the question . . .”
Nobody suggested a landing at the spaceport. It must be in rebel hands; and those same rebels, in all probability, possessed at least a share of Earth-manufactured weapons and would be willing to use them against the Earthmen whose lackeys their rulers had been. Star Pioneer was armed, of course—but too active participation in other people’s wars is frowned upon.
“You could land on the water,” said Grimes. “To leeward of the island.”
“I’m not a master mariner, Commodore,” Farrell told him rather nastily. “But this is my ship, and I’m not hazarding her. We’ll orbit about Esquel and send down a boat.”
I hope that one boat will be enough, thought Grimes, not without sympathy. The mess isn’t of your making, Jimmy boy, but you’ll have to answer the “please explains.” And as human beings we have some responsibility for the nongs and drongoes we’ve been propping up with Terran bayonets—or Terran credits, which have been used to purchase Terran bayonets or their present day equivalent.
“Whatever his shortcomings,” commented Sonya, “High King Cabrarar used his brains. He knew that if the beacon ceased functioning there’d be an investigation . . .”
“And better us to make it,” said Farrell, “than Dalby and his bunch of no hopers.”
“Why?” asked Grimes coldly.
“We’re disciplined, armed . . .”
“And if you’ll take my advice, Commander, you’ll not be in a hurry to use your arms. The top brass is apt to take a dim view of active intervention in outsiders’ private squabbles.”
“But Cabrarar . . .”
“. . . was the Federation’s blue-eyed boy. His kingdom now is limited to one tiny island. I’ve no doubt that your lords and masters are already considering dickering with whatever new scum comes to the top.”
“Sir . . .” One of the officers was trying to break into the conversation.
“Yes, Mr. Penrose?”
“A signal, sir, from Officer Commanding Lindisfarne Base . . .”
After a long pause he read aloud, “Evacuate King Cabrarar and entourage. Otherwise do nothing, repeat nothing, to antagonize new regime on Esquel.”
“As I’ve been saying,” commented Grimes. “But at least they’re exhibiting some faint flickers of conscience.”
Shortly thereafter Farrell ordered a half hour’s reduction of acceleration to one G, a break necessary to allow personnel to do whatever they had to do essential to their comfort. Grimes and Sonya—she with some reluctance—left the control room and retired to their own quarters.
Star Pioneer was in orbit about Esquel. Free fall, after the bone-crushing emergency acceleration, was a luxury—but it was not one that Commander Farrell and those making up the landing party were allowed to enjoy for long. Farrell had decided to send down only one boat—the pinnace. There was insufficient level ground on the island for more than one craft to make a safe landing. He had learned from King Cabrarar that the rebels had control of the air, and that their aircraft were equipped with air-to-air missiles. An air-spacecraft hovering, awaiting its turn to land, would be a tempting target—and effective self-defense on its part could easily be the beginnings of a nasty incident.
The deposed monarch and his party comprised three hundred beings, in terms of mass equivalent to two hundred Earthmen. In addition to its crew the pinnace could lift fifty men; so four rescue trips would be necessary. While the evacuation was in process a small party from the ship would remain on the island, deciding what in the way of stores, equipment and documents would be destroyed, what lifted off. Sonya had volunteered to be one of the party, pointing out that she was the only representative of the Intelligence Branch of the Survey Service in the ship, Reserve commission notwithstanding. Too, Esquelian was one of the many languages at her command; some years ago it had been intended that she visit Esquel, at the time of the installation of the Carlotti beacon, but these orders had been canceled when she was sent elsewhere on a more urgent mission. So, even though she had never set foot on the planet, she could make herself understood and—much more important—understand what was being said in her hearing.
Grimes insisted on accompanying his wife. He was an outsider, with no standing—but, as he pointed out to Farrell, this could prove advantageous. He would have more freedom of action than Star Pioneer’s people, not being subject to the orders of the distant Flag Officer at Lindisfarne Base. Farrell was inclined to agree with him on this point, then said, “But it still doesn’t let me off the hook, Commodore. Suppose you shoot somebody who, in the opinion of my lords and masters, shouldn’t have been shot . . . And suppose I say, ‘But, sir, it was Commodore Grimes, of the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, who did the shooting . . .’ What do they say?”
“Why the bloody hell did you let him?” replied Grimes, laughing. “But I promise to restrain my trigger finger, James.”
“He’s made up his mind to come,” Sonya said. “But not to worry. After all his playing at being a merchant sea captain he’ll not know one end of a gun from the other . . .”
So, with the landing party aboard, the pinnace broke out of its bay and detached itself from the mother ship. The young lieutenant at the controls was a superb boat handler, driving the craft down to the first tenuous wisps of atmosphere, then decelerating before friction could overheat the skin. Drarg Island was in the sunlit hemisphere, the sky over which was unusually clear—so clear that there was no likelihood of mistaking the smoke from at least two burning cities for natural cloud. Navigation presented no problems. All that the officer had to do was to home on a continuous signal from the transmitter on the island. Grimes would have liked to have played with the bubble sextant and the ephemerides—produced by Star Pioneer’s navigator just in case they would be needed—that were part of the boat’s equipment, but when he suggested so doing Sonya gave him such a scornful look that he desisted.
There was the island: a slowly expanding speck in the white-flecked sea. And there, a long way to the westward, were two airships, ungainly dirigible balloons. They must have seen the pinnace on her way down, but they made no attempt to intercept; a blimp is not an ideal aircraft in which to practice the kamikaze technique. But, remarked Farrell, they would be reporting this Terran intervention to their base. The radio operator found their working frequency and Sonya was able to translate the high-pitched squeakings and gibberings.
“As near as I can render it,” she reported, “they’re saying, ‘The bastard king’s bastard friends have come . . .’ In the original it’s much more picturesque.” The operator turned up the gain to get the reply. “ ‘Keep the bastards under observation,’ ” said Sonya. Then, “ ‘Use Code 17A . . .’ ”
“They can use any code they please,” commented Farrell. “With what weaponry there is on this world, the island’s impregnable. It’ll be more impregnable still after we’ve landed a few of our toys.”
“Never underrate primitive peoples,” Grimes told him. He dredged up a maritime historical snippet from his capacious memory. “In one of the wars on Earth—the Sino-Japanese War in the first half of the twentieth century—a modern Japanese destroyer was sent to the bottom by the fire of a concealed battery of primitive muzzle-loading cannon, loaded with old nails, broken bottles and horseshoes for luck . . .”
“Fascinating, Commodore, fascinating,” said Farrell. “If you see any muzzle-loaders pointed our way, let me know, will you?”
Sonya laughed unkindly.
Grimes, who had brought two pipes with him, took out and filled and lit the one most badly in need of a clean.
They dropped down almost vertically on to the island, the lieutenant in charge of the pinnace making due allowance for drift. As they got lower they could see that the elliptical Mobius strip that was the antenna of the Carlotti beacon was still, was not rotating about its long axis. Draped around it were rags of fabric streaming to leeward in the stiff breeze. It looked, at first, as though somebody had improvised a wind sock for the benefit of the landing party—and then it was obvious that the fluttering tatters were the remains of a gasbag. A little to one side of the machinery house was a crumpled tangle of wickerwork and more fabric, the wreckage of the gondola of the crashed airship. Some, at least, of the refugees on the island must have come by air.
Landing would have been easy if the Esquelians had bothered to clear away the wreckage. The lieutenant suggested setting the pinnace down on top of it, but Farrell stopped him. Perhaps he was remembering Grimes’s story about that thin-skinned Japanese destroyer. He said, “There’s metal there, Mr. Smith—the engine, and weapons, perhaps, and other odds and ends. We don’t want to go punching holes in ourselves . . .”
So the pinnace hovered for a while, vibrating to the noisy, irregular throb of her inertial drive, while the spidery, purple-furred humanoids on the ground capered and gesticulated. Finally, after Sonya had screamed orders at them through the ship’s loudhailer, a party of them dragged the wreckage to the edge of the cliff, succeeded in pushing it over. It plunged untidily down to the rocks far below. There was a brilliant orange flash, a billowing of dirty white-brown smoke, a shock wave that rocked the pinnace dangerously. There must have been ammunition of some kind in that heap of debris.
Farrell said nothing. But if looks could have killed, the King, standing aloof from his loyal subjects, distinguishable by the elaborate basketwork of gold and jewels on his little, round head, would have died. Somebody muttered, “Slovenly bastards . . .” Grimes wondered if the rebels were any more efficient than the ruling class they had deposed, decided that they almost certainly must be. It was such a familiar historical pattern.
The pinnace grounded. The noise of the inertial drive faded to an irritable mumble, then ceased. Farrell unbuckled his seat belt, then put on his ca
p, then got up. Sonya—who was also wearing a uniform for the occasion—did likewise. Somehow, the pair of them conveyed the impression that Grimes had not been invited to the party, but he followed them to the airlock, trying to look like a duly accredited observer from the Rim Worlds Confederacy. The airlock doors, inner and outer, opened. The Commodore sniffed appreciatively the breeze that gusted in, the harsh tang of salt water that is the same on all oceanic worlds. His second sniff was not such a deep one; the air of the island was tainted with the effluvium of too many people cooped up in far too small a space.
The ramp extended. Farrell walked slowly down it, followed by Sonya, followed by Grimes, followed by two ratings with machine pistols at the ready. The King stood a few yards away, watching them, surrounded by his own officers, monkeylike beings on the purple fur of whose bodies gleamed the golden ornaments that were badges of rank.
Stiffly (reluctantly?) Farrell saluted.
Limply the King half raised a six-fingered hand in acknowledgment. The rings on his long fingers sparkled in the afternoon sunlight. He turned to one of the staff, gibbering.
The being faced Farrell, baring yellow teeth as he spoke. “His Majesty say, why you no come earlier?”
“We came as soon as we were able,” said Farrell.
There was more gibbering, unintelligible to all save Sonya. Then—“His Majesty say, where big ship? When you start bomb cities, kill rebels?”
Farrell turned to face his own people. He said, “Take over, please, Commander Verrill. You know the language. You might be able to explain things more diplomatically than me. You know the orders.”
“I know the orders, Commander Farrell,” said Sonya. She stepped forward to face the King, speaking fluently and rapidly. Even when delivered by her voice, thought Grimes, this Esquelian language was still ugly, but she took the curse off it.
The King replied to her directly. He was literally hopping from one splayed foot to the other with rage. Spittle sprayed from between his jagged, yellow teeth. The elaborate crown on his head was grotesquely awry. He raised a long, thin arm as though to strike the woman.
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