First Command

by A Bertram Chandler

  Hayakawa got slowly and ponderously to his feet. “Captain san . . .” he murmured.

  “Sit down, Mr. Hayakawa,” ordered Grimes. The acceleration—now more than two Gs—was bad enough for him; it would be far, far worse for one of the telepath’s build. He lowered himself to a pile of silk cushions. Not for the first time he regretted that Hayakawa had been allowed to break the regulations governing the furnishing of officers’ cabins—but PCOs, trading upon their rarity, are privileged persons aboard any ship.

  He settled down into a position approximating comfort—and then had to get up and shift the cushions and himself to another site. From the first one he had far too good a view of Hayakawa’s psionic amplifier, the disembodied dog’s brain suspended in its globe of cloudy nutrient fluid. The view of Mount Fujiyama was much more preferable.

  He said, “We have Schnauzer on the M.P.I. now.”

  “I know, Captain.”

  “You would,” remarked Grimes, but without rancor. “And you still haven’t picked up any further . . . emanations from her?”

  “No. Her PCO is Delwyn Hume. I have met him. He is a good man. What you called my judo technique worked just once with him. It will never work again.” Then Hayakawa smiled fatly and sweetly. “But I have other news for you.”

  “Tell.”

  “Southerly Buster, Captain. Myra Bracegirdle is the CPO. She is good—but, of course, we are all good. Her screen is as tight as that maintained by Hume or myself. But . . .

  “She is emotional. During moments of stress her own thoughts seep through. She hates the Buster’s mate. His name is Aloysius Dreebly. Now and again—often, in fact—he tries to force his attentions on her.”

  “Interesting,” commented Grimes. He thought, This is building up to one of those situations where everybody hates everybody. Mr. Saul hates Captain Kane, although he’s never met him personally. Myra hates Aloysius. The way Maggie’s been carrying on lately I’m beginning to think that she hates me. And I doubt very much if Captain Danzellan feels any great affection for Mr. Francis Delamere . . . . He grinned. But Frankie loves Tabbie . . . .

  He said, “And is Southerly Buster bound for Morrowvia?”

  “I cannot say, Captain. But she is around. And just before you came in I ‘heard’ Myra Bracegirdle think, “Thank the gods there’re only seven more days to go before we arrive!’ “

  And that, Grimes told himself, means that she gets there at the same time as us . . . .

  He clambered laboriously to his feet, went to Hayakawa’s telephone. He punched, first of all, for Lieutenant Connery’s quarters, but the engineering officer was not there. He called the engine room, and found him.

  “Captain here, Chief. Can you squeeze out another half lume?”

  “I can’t.” Connery’s voice was sharp. “The governor’s playing up, an’ we’re havin’ to run the Drive on manual control. If I try to push her any more we’ll finish up last Thursday in the middle of sweet fuck all!”

  “Can’t you fix the governor?”

  “Not without stoppin’ her an’ shuttin’ down. If you want to carry on, it’ll have to wait until we get to Morrowvia.”

  “Carry on the way you’re doing,” said Grimes.

  6

  Seeker saw nothing at all of Southerly Buster until both vessels were in orbit about Morrowvia, just prior to landing. This was not surprising, as Drongo Kane’s ship had been approaching the planet from the Shakespearian Sector, whilst Grimes had been coming in from Lindisfarne. The angle subtended by these points of origin was little short of 180∞. Furthermore, once Morrowvia itself had come within MPI range the instrument, insofar as bodies of less than planetary mass were concerned, was practically useless. And radar had been useless until the shutting down of the time-space twisting interstellar drive.

  There was Seeker, hanging in equatorial orbit three hundred miles up from the surface, and below her was Morrowvia, an Earth-type world, but unspoiled. There were blue seas and vast expanses of green prairie and forest land, yellow deserts and polar icecaps as dazzlingly white as the drifting cloud masses. There were snow-peaked mountain ranges, and long, winding rivers, on the banks of which, sparsely scattered, were what seemed to be towns and villages—but from a range of hundreds of miles, even with excellent telescopes, human habitations can look like natural formations, and natural formations like buildings, and telltale industrial smog was altogether lacking.

  On the night hemisphere the evidence was more conclusive. There were clusters of lights, faint and yellowish. Said Grimes, “Where there’s light there’s life, intelligent life . . . .”

  “Not necessarily,” Maggie Lazenby told him. “There are such things as volcanoes, you know . . .”

  “On this hemisphere only? Come off it, Maggie.”

  “And there are such things as luminescent living organisms.”

  “So what we’re seeing are glowworm colonies? And what about the reports from our agents on Siluria and Elsinore and Drroomoorr? Would either the Dog Star Line or Drongo Kane be interested in glowworms?”

  “They might be,” she said. “They might be.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s high time, Commander Grimes, that you cured yourself of your habit of jumping to conclusions, that you adopted a scientific approach.”

  Grimes decided against making some cutting retort. The other officers in the control room were looking far too amused by the exchange. He grunted, then demanded of Lieutenant Saul, “Any sign yet of Southerly Buster, Number One?”

  “No, sir. Perhaps Mr. Hayakawa . . .”

  “I’ve already asked him. As far as his Peke’s brain in aspic and he are concerned, the Buster’s maintaining absolute psionic silence.”

  “Peke’s brain?” asked Maggie.

  “Can you think of any definitely Japanese dog at a second’s notice?”

  And then a voice came from the NST transceiver. It was a man’s voice, harsh, yet not unpleasant, strongly accented.”Southerly Buster to Aero-Space Control. Southerly Buster to Aero-Space Control. Do you read me? Over.”

  “But there’s not any Aero-Space Control here,” announced Lieutenant Timmins. “We’ve already found that out.”

  “Kane knows that as well as we do,” Grimes told him. “But, to judge by his record, he always maintains a facade of absolute legality in everything he does. This fits in.”

  “And I suppose,” said Saul, “that he’s already tried to establish communication with the local telepaths, if any, just as we did.”

  “Not necessarily. His PCO will have ‘heard’ our Mr. Hayakawa doing just that, and she’ll have learned that Morrowvia is lousy with telepaths, but none of them trained . . . . Oh, they know we’re here, in a vague sort of way . . . .”

  “Southerly Buster to Aero-Space Control. Southerly Buster to Aero-Space Control. Do you read me? Over.”

  “There she is!” shouted Pitcher suddenly.

  There she was, in the radar screen, a tiny yet bright blip. There she was, a new star lifting above the dark limb of the planet, a tiny planetoid reflecting the rays of Gamma Argo.

  “If we can see her, she can see us,” commented Grimes. He went to the transceiver, ordered, “Put me on to him, Mr. Timmins.” He said sternly, “FSS Seeker to Southerly Buster. FSS Seeker to Southerly Buster. Come in, please, on audio-visual.”

  “Comin’ in, Seeker, comin’ in . . .” drawled the voice. There was a swirl of light and color in the little screen, coalescing into a clear picture. Grimes and his officers looked into a control room not unlike their own—even to a weapons control console situated as it would have been in the nerve center of a warship. And this Southerly Buster was a merchantman . . . . Drongo Kane calmly regarded Grimes from the screen—bleak yet not altogether humorless blue eyes under a thatch of straw colored hair, in a face that looked as though at some time it had been completely smashed and then reassembled not over carefully. He said, “I see you, Seeker. Can you see me?”

  “I see yo
u,” snapped Grimes.

  “Identify yourself, please, Seeker. Can’t be too careful once you’re off the beaten tracks, y’know.”

  “Grimes,” said the owner of that name at last. “Lieutenant Commander in command of FSS Seeker, Survey Vessel.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Commander Grimes. An’ what, may I ask, brings you out to this neck o’ the woods?”

  “You mayn’t ask. That’s Federation business, Captain Kane.”

  The pale eyebrows lifted in mock surprise. “So you know me, Commander! Well, well. Such is fame.”

  “Or notoriety . . .” murmured Maggie Lazenby.

  “Did I hear the lady behind you say somethin’?” inquired Kane.

  Grimes ignored this. “What are your intentions, Captain Kane?” he demanded.

  “Well, now, that all depends, Commander Grimes. Nobody owns this world ‘cepting its people. I’ve asked if I could make a landing, but got no reply. I s’pose you heard me. But nobody’s told me not to land . . . .”

  “What are your intentions?” demanded Grimes again.

  “Oh, to set the old Buster’s arse down onto somethin’ safe an’ solid. An’ after that . . . Fossick around. See what we can buy or barter that’s worth liftin’. There’re some spacemen, Commander—an’ I’m one of ‘em—who have to earn their livin’s . . . .”

  “It is my duty—and the way that I earn my living—to afford protection to all Federation citizens in deep space, interplanetary space, in planetary atmospheres and on planetary surfaces,” said Grimes, with deliberate pomposity.

  “You needn’t put yourself out, Commander.”

  “I insist, Captain. After all, as you said, one can’t be too careful when off the beaten track.”

  Kane’s lips moved. Grimes was no lip-reader, but he would have been willing to bet a month’s salary that grave doubts were being cast upon his legitimacy—and, were this a less tolerant day and age, his morals. “Suit yourself,” said Kane aloud. “But you’re only wastin’ your time.”

  “I’m the best judge of that.”

  “Suit yourself,” growled Kane again.

  Meanwhile, Seeker’s inertial drive had stammered into life and the ship was both slowing and lifting under the application of thrust, being driven into a powered, unnatural orbit so that Southerly Buster could pass beneath her.

  “I thought you’d be landing first,” complained Kane.

  “After you, Captain,” Grimes told him politely.

  And just where would Kane be setting his ship down? If Seeker had arrived by herself Grimes would have adhered to orthodox Survey Service practice—a dawn landing at the terminator, with the full period of daylight for the initial exploration. And should it be considered safe to establish contact with the indigenes at once, a landing near to an obvious center of population.

  Kane had never been an officer in the Survey Service, but he had done his share of exploring, had made first landings on planets upon which he had been the first man to set foot. Slowly, steadily Southerly Buster dropped through the atmosphere, with Seeker following a respectable distance astern. All Seeker’s armament was ready for instant use; Grimes had no doubt that the other ship was in a similar state of readiness. Corgi’s people had been hospitably treated on Morrowvia—but this was a large planet, probably divided among tribes or nations. Even though all its populace shared a common origin there had been time for divergence, for the generation of hostilities.

  Down dropped Southerly Buster—down, down. Down dropped Seeker, her people alert for hostile action either from the ground or from the other ship. Grimes let Saul handle the pilotage; this was one of those occasions on which the captain needed to be able to look all ways at once.

  Down dropped the two ships—down, down through the clear morning air. Kane’s objective was becoming obvious—an expanse of level ground, clear of trees, that was almost an island, bounded to north, west and south by a winding river, to the east by a wooded hill. To north and west of it were villages, each with a sparse sprinkling of yellow lights still visible in the dawn twilight. It was the sort of landing place that Grimes would have selected for himself.

  Then the viewscreen, with its high magnification, was no longer necessary, and the big binoculars on their universal mounting were no longer required. And the sun was up, at ground level, casting long shadows, pointing out all the irregularities that could make the landing of a starship hazardous.

  Kane was down first, setting the Buster neatly into the middle of a patch of green that, from the air at least, looked perfectly smooth. Saul looked up briefly from his controls to Grimes, complaining. “The bastard’s picked the best place. . . .”

  “To the west of him . . .” Grimes said. “Almost on the river bank. . . . It doesn’t look too bad.”

  “It’ll have to do, Captain,” murmured the first lieutenant resignedly.

  It had to do—and, as Grimes had said, it wasn’t too bad.

  Only one recoil cylinder in the tripedal landing gear was burst when Seeker touched the ground, and there was no other damage.

  7

  This was not the occasion for full dress uniforms, with fore-and-aft hat, decorations, ceremonial sword and all the other trimmings. This was an occasion for comfortable shorts-and-shirt, with heavy boots and functional sidearms.

  So attired, Grimes marched down Seeker’s ramp, followed by Captain Philby, the Marine officer, and a squad of his space soldiers. Maggie Lazenby and the other scientists had wished to accompany him, but he had issued strict orders that nobody excepting himself and the Marines was to leave the ship until such time as the situation had been clarified. And this clarification depended upon the local inhabitants as well as upon Drongo Kane. Meanwhile, Grimes had said, no foolish risks were to be taken.

  As he marched toward the towering hulk of Southerly Buster he regretted his decision to land to the west of that ship; he had put himself at a disadvantage. The light of the still-low sun was blinding, making it difficult for his men and him to avoid the lavish scattering of quartzite boulders that protruded through the short, coarse grass. And it made it impossible to see if Drongo Kane had any weapons aimed at him and his party. Probably he had—but Seeker’s main armament was trained upon Kane’s ship and ready to blow her off the face of the planet at the slightest provocation.

  It was a little better once he and the Marines were in the shadow of the other ship. Grimes’s eyes adjusted themselves and he stared upward at the blunt, metallic spire as he walked toward it. Defensively armed! he thought scornfully. Those two famous quick-firing cannon reported by the Bug Queen were merely an addition to what the Buster already had. Even so, in terms of laser and missiles, Seeker had the edge on her.

  Southerly Buster’s ramp was down. At the foot of it an officer was standing, a skeletal figure attired in gray coveralls with shoulder-boards carrying first mate’s braid. The man was capless, and bald, and the wrinkled skin of his face was yellow, almost matching the long teeth that he showed when he smiled at the men from Seeker.

  “Commander Grimes?” he asked in an overly ingratiating voice.

  “Mr. Dreebly?” countered Grimes.

  “Aloysius Dreebly, sir, at your service.”

  And so this, thought Grimes, was Aloysius Dreebly. Small wonder that Myra Bracegirdle, Southerly Buster’s PCO, hated him. He matched his name—as people with ugly names so very often do. They, as it were, grow to fit the labels that misguided parents bestow upon them at birth. And this Dreebly, Grimes continued thinking, I wouldn’t trust him behind me. He’d either kiss my arse or stab me in the back—or both.

  “And will you come aboard, Commander? Captain Kane is waiting for you.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Dreebly. Lead the way, please.”

  “Oh, sir, I’m afraid I cannot allow these other men aboard the ship . . . .”

  “And I’m afraid that I can’t board unless I have an escort of my own people. Captain Philby!”

  “Sir!”

  The young
Marine officer had his pistol out, pointing at Dreebly. His sergeant and the six privates held their rifles at the ready.

  “But, sir . . . what are you thinking of? This is piracy!”

  “Hardly, Mr. Dreebly. All the way from our ship to yours we were tracked by the muzzle of one of your quick-firers. Surely you will allow us to show our teeth.”

  “Let the bastards aboard, Dreebly!” boomed Kane’s voice from a loudspeaker. “But put your guns away first, Commander. I don’t expect my guests to check in their pocket artillery at the door—but, on the other hand, I take a dim view if it’s waved in my face.”

  At a word from Grimes Philby reholstered his pistol, the Marines slung their machine rifles. Dreebly shambled up the ramp to the after airlock, followed by the party from Seeker. Inside the compartment, Grimes looked about him curiously. He had been expecting something squalid—but, at first glance at least, this seemed to be a reasonably well-kept ship. There was a distinct absence of Survey Service spit-and-polish—but such is found only in vessels where there is a superfluity of ratings to do the spitting and polishing. There was shabbiness—but everything looked to be in excellent working order.

  The elevator from the stern to the control room would accommodate only four men. Grimes decided to take Philby and one private with him, told the captain to tell his sergeant and the remaining Marines to stand guard in the airlock and at the foot of the ramp. (The Marines were apt to sulk if anybody but one of their own officers gave them a direct order.) Dreebly led the way into the cage and, as soon as the others were standing there with him, pressed a button.

  She was quite a hunk of ship, this Southerly Buster, thought Grimes, as they slid rapidly upward, deck after deck. She had probably started life as an Interstellar Transport Commission’s Gamma Class cargo liner but, under successive ownership, had been modified and remodified many times. A vessel this size, even with a minimal crew, would be expensive to run. Whatever Kane’s activities were, they must show a profit.