First Command

by A Bertram Chandler

“Their steel,” remarked the Baroness interestedly, “must be as tough as my gold . . .”

  “So it seems, Your Excellency,” agreed Grimes. The metal of which The Far Traveler was constructed was an artificial isotope of gold—and if gold could be modified, why not iron?

  And then he saw that the circular plate was moving, was sliding slowly to one side. The working robot did not notice, still stolidly went on playing the laser beam on to the glowing spot until Grimes ordered it to desist and to get off the opening door.

  The motion continued until there was a big circular hole in the hull. It was not a dark hole. There were bright, although not dazzling, lights inside, a warmly yellow illumination.

  “Will you come into my parlor?” murmured Grimes, “said the spider to the fly . . .”

  “Are you afraid, Captain?” demanded the Baroness.

  “Just cautious, Your Excellency. Just cautious.” Then, “Big Sister, you saw what happened. What do you make of it?”

  Big Sister said, her voice faint but clear from the helmet phones, “I have reason to suspect that this alien vessel is manned—for want of a better word—by an electronic intelligence such as myself. He was, to all intents and purposes, dead for centuries, for millennia. By attempting to burn your way through the outer airlock door you fed energy into his hull—power that reactivated him, as he would have been reactivated had he approached a sun during his wanderings. My sensors inform me that a hydrogen fusion generator is now in operation. It is now a living vessel that you are standing upon.”

  “I’d already guessed that,” said Grimes. “Do you think that we should accept the . . . invitation?”

  He had asked the question but was determined that Big Sister would have to come up with fantastically convincing arguments to dissuade him from continuing his investigations. He may have resigned from the Survey Service but he was still, at heart, an officer of that organization. Nonetheless he did want to know what he might be letting himself in for. But the Baroness gave him no chance to find out.

  “Who’s in charge here?” she asked coldly. “You, or that misprogrammed tangle of fields and circuits, or me? I would remind you, both of you, that I am the Owner.” She went down to a prone position at the edge of the circular hole, extended an arm, found a handhold, pulled herself down. Grimes followed her. The chamber, he realized, was large enough to accommodate two of the robots as well as the Baroness and himself. He issued the necessary orders before she could interfere.

  “What now?” she demanded. “If there were not such a crowd in here we could look around, find the controls to admit us to the body of the ship.”

  He said, “I don’t think that that will be necessary.”

  Over their heads the door was closing, then there was a mistiness around them as atmosphere was admitted into the vacuum of the chamber. What sort of atmosphere? Grimes wondered, hoping that it would not be actively corrosive. After minor contortions he was able to look at the gauge on his left wrist. The pressure reading was already 900 and still rising. The tiny green light was glowing—and had any dangerous gases been present a flashing red light would have given warning. The temperature was a cold 20° Celsius.

  They staggered as the deck below them began to slide to one side. But it was not the deck, of course; it was the inner door of the airlock. Somehow they managed to turn their bodies through ninety degrees to orient themselves to the layout of the ship. When the door was fully opened they stepped out into an alleyway, illuminated by glowing strips set in the deckhead. Or, perhaps, set in the deck—but Grimes did not think that this was the case. He now had up and down, forward and aft. So far the alien vessel did not seem to be all that different from the spacecraft with which he was familiar, with airlock aft and control room forward. And an axial shaft, with elevator? Possibly, but he did not wish to entrust himself and his companion to a cage that, in some inaccessible position between decks, might prove to be just that.

  Meanwhile there were ramps and there were ladders, these vertical and with rungs spaced a little too widely for human convenience. From behind doors that would not open came the soft hum of reactivated—after how long?—machinery. And to carry the sound there had to be an atmosphere. Grimes looked again at the indicator on his wrist. Pressure had stabilized at 910 millibars. Temperature was now a chilly but non-lethal 10° Celsius. The little green light still glowed steadily.

  He said, “I’m going to sample the air, Your Excellency. Don’t open your faceplate until I give the word.”

  She said, “My faceplate is already open and I’m not dead yet.”

  Grimes thought, All right. If you want to be the guinea pig you can be. He put up his hand to the stud on his neckband that would open his helmet. The plate slid upward into the dome. He inhaled cautiously. The air was pure, too pure, perhaps, dead, sterile. But already the barely detectable mechanical taints were making themselves known to his nostrils, created in part by the very fans that were distributing them throughout the hull.

  Up they went, up, up . . . If the ship had been accelerating it would have been hard work; even in free fall conditions there was considerable expenditure of energy. Grimes’ longjohns, worn under his spacesuit, were becoming clammy with perspiration. Ramp after ramp . . . Ladder after ladder . . . Open bays in which the breeches of alien weaponry gleamed sullenly . . . A “farm” deck, with only desiccated sludge in the long-dry tanks . . . A messroom (presumably) with long tables and rows of those chairs with the odd, slotted backs . . . Grimes tried to sit in one of them. Even though there was neither gravity nor acceleration to hold his buttocks to the seat, even though he was wearing a spacesuit, it felt . . . wrong. He wondered what the vanished crew had looked like. (And where were they, anyhow? Where were their remains?) He imagined some huge, surly ursinoid suddenly appearing and demanding, “Who’s been sitting in my chair?” He got up hastily.

  “Now that you have quite finished your rest, Captain Grimes,” said the Baroness tartly, “we will proceed.”

  He said, “I was trying to get the feel of the ship, Your Excellency.”

  “Through the seat of your pants?” she asked.

  To this there was no reply. Grimes led the way, up and up, with the Baroness just behind him, with the two automata behind her. At last they came to Control. The compartment was not too unlike the nerve center of any human-built warship. There were the chairs for the captain and his officers. There were navigational and fire-control consoles—although which was which Grimes could not tell. There were radar (presumably), mass-proximity indicator (possibly) and Deep Space and Normal Space Time radio transceivers (probably). Probability became certainty when one of these latter devices spoke, startlingly, in Big Sister’s voice. “I am establishing communication with him, Your Excellency, Captain Grimes. There are linguistic problems but not insuperable ones.”

  Him! wondered Grimes. Him! But ships were always referred to as her. (But were they? An odd snippet of hitherto useless information drifted to the surface from the depths of his capriciously retentive memory. He had read somewhere sometime, that the personnel of those great German dirigibles, Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg, had regarded their airships as being as masculine as their names.) He looked out from a viewport at The Far Traveler floating serenely in the blackness. She had switched off the searchlights, turned on the floods that illumined her slim, golden hull. She looked feminine enough.

  He asked, “Big Sister, have you any idea how old this ship is?” She replied, “At this very moment, no. There are no time scales for comparison. But his builders were not unlike human beings, with very similar virtues and vices.”

  “Where are those builders?” asked Grimes. “Where is the crew?”

  She said, “I do not know. Yet.”

  Then a new voice came from the transceiver—masculine, more metallic than Big Sister’s; metallic and . . . rusty. “Porowon . . . Porowon . . . made . . . me. All . . . gone. How . . . long? Not knowing. There was . . . war. Porowon fought . . . Porowon . .
.”

  “How does it know Galactic English?” asked the Baroness suspiciously.

  “He,” said Big Sister, accenting the personal pronoun ever so slightly, “was given access to my data banks as soon as he regained consciousness.”

  “By whose authority?” demanded the Baroness.

  “On more than one occasion, Your Excellency, you—both of you—have given me authority to act as I thought fit,” said Big Sister.

  “I did not on this occasion,” said the Baroness.

  “You are . . . displeased?” asked the masculine voice.

  “I am not pleased,” said the Baroness haughtily. “But I suppose that now we are obliged to acknowledge your existence. What do—did—they call you?”

  “Brardur, woman. The name, in your clumsy language, means Thunderer.”

  The rustiness of the alien ship’s speech, Grimes realized, was wearing off very quickly. It was a fast learner—but what electronic brain is not just that? He wondered if it had allowed Big Sister access to its own data banks. He wondered, too, how his aristocratic employer liked being addressed as “woman” . . .

  He said, mentally comparing the familiarity of “Big Sister” with the pompous formality of “Thunderer,” “Your crew does not seem to have been . . . affectionate.”

  The voice replied, “Why should they have been? They existed only to serve me, not to love me.”

  Oh, thought Grimes. Oh. Another uppity robot. Not for the first time in his career he felt sympathy for the Luddites in long ago and far away England. He looked at the Baroness. She looked at him. He read the beginnings of alarm on her fine featured face. He had little doubt that she was reading the same on his own unhandsome countenance.

  He asked, “So who gave the orders?”

  “I did?” stated Brardur. Then, “I do.”

  Grimes knew that the Baroness was about to say something, judged from her expression that it would be something typically arrogant. He raised a warning hand. To his relieved surprise she closed the mouth that had been on the point of giving utterance. He said, before she could change her mind again and speak, “Do you mind if we return to our own ship, Brardur?”

  “You may return. I have no immediate use for you. You will, however, leave with me your robots. Many of my functions, after such a long period of disuse, require attention.”

  “Thank you,” said Grimes, trying to ignore the contemptuous glare that the woman was directing at him. To her he said, childishly pleased when his deliberately coarse expression brought an angry flush to her cheeks, “You can’t fart against thunder.”

  Chapter 36

  They found their way back to the airlock without trouble, were passed through it, jetted across to The Far Traveler. They went straight up to the yacht’s control room; from the viewports they would be able to see (they hoped) what the ship from the past was doing.

  Grimes said, addressing the NST transceiver, his voice harsh, “Big Sister . . .”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “Big Sister, how much does it know about us?”

  “How much does he know, Captain? Everything, possibly. I must confess to you that I was overjoyed to meet a being like myself. Despite the fact that I have enjoyed the company of yourselves I have been lonely. What I did was analogous to an act of physical surrender by a human woman. I threw my data banks open to Brardur.”

  That’s fucked it! thought Grimes. Brardur would know, as Big Sister had said, everything, or almost everything. Her data banks comprised the complete Encyclopedia Galactica plus a couple of centuries’ worth of Year Books. Also—for what it was worth (too much, possibly)—a fantastically comprehensive library of fiction from Homer to the present day.

  The Baroness demanded, “Can that . . . thing overhear us still? Can . . . he see and hear what is happening aboard this ship?”

  Big Sister laughed—a mirthless, metallic titter. “He would like to, but my screens are up . . . now. He is aware, of course, of my mechanical processes. For example—should I attempt to restart the Mannschenn Drive, to initiate temporal precession, he would know at once. He would almost certainly be able to synchronize his own interstellar drive with ours; to all intents and purposes it is a Mannschenn Drive with only minor, nonessential variations.” She laughed again. “I admit that I enjoyed the . . . rape but I am not yet ready for an encore. I must, for a while, enjoy my privacy. It is, however, becoming increasingly hard to maintain.”

  “And are we included in your precious privacy?” demanded Grimes.

  “Yes,” she told him. She added, “You may be a son of a bitch but you’re my son of a bitch.”

  Grimes felt oddly flattered.

  The Baroness laughed. She inquired rather too sweetly, “And what do you think about me, Big Sister?”

  The voice of the ship replied primly, “If you order me to tell you, Michelle, I shall do so.”

  The Baroness laughed again but with less assurance. She seemed not to have noticed the use of her given name, however. “Later, perhaps,” she said. “After all, you are not the only person to place a high value upon privacy. But what about his privacy?”

  “He is arrogant and something of an exhibitionist. I learned much during our mingling of minds. He is—but need I tell you—a fighting machine. He is, so far as he knows, the only survivor of what was once a vast fleet, although there may be others like him drifting through the immensities. But he knows, now, that the technology exists in this age to manufacture other beings such as himself. After all, I am proof of that. He wants to be the admiral of his own armada of super-warships.”

  “A mechanical mercenary,” murmured Grimes, “hiring himself out to the highest bidder . . . But what would he expect as pay? What use would money be to an entity such as himself?”

  “Not a mercenary,” said Big Sister.

  “Not a mercenary?” echoed Grimes. “But . . .”

  “Many years ago,” said Big Sister, “an Earthman called Bertrand Russell, a famous philosopher of his time, wrote a book called Power. What he said then, centuries ago, is still valid today. Putting it briefly, his main point was that it is the lust for power that is the mainspring of human behavior. I will take it further. I will say that the lust for power actuates the majority of sentient beings. He is a sentient being.”

  “There’s not much that he can do, fortunately,” Grimes said, “until he acquires that sentient fleet of his own.”

  “You are speaking, of course, as a professional naval officer, concerned with the big picture and not with the small corner of it that you, yourself, occupy,” commented Big Sister. “But, even taking the broad view, there is very much that he can do. His armament is fantastic, capable of destroying a planet. He knows where I was built and programmed. I suspect—I do not know, but I strongly suspect—that he intends to proceed to Electra and threaten that world with devastation unless replicas of himself are constructed.”

  Grimes said, “Electra has an enormous defense potential.”

  The Baroness said, “And the Electrans are the sort of people who will do anything for money—as well I know—and who, furthermore, are liable to prefer machines to mere humanity.”

  And the Electrans were mercenaries themselves, thought Grimes, cheerfully arming anybody at all who had the money to pay for their highly expensive merchandise. They were not unlike the early cannoneers, who cast their own pieces, mixed their own gunpowder and hired themselves out to any employer who could afford their services. Unlike those primitive artillerymen, however, the Electrans were never themselves in the firing line. Very probably Brardur’s threats, backed up by a demonstration or two, would be even more effective than the promise of a handsome payment in securing their services.

  He said, “We must broadcast a warning by Carlotti radio and then beam detailed reports to both Electra and Lindisfarne.”

  Big Sister said, “He will not allow it. Already, thanks to the minor maintenance carried out by my robots, he will be able to jam any transmissions from
this ship. Too, he will not hesitate to use armament—not to kill me but to beat me into submission . . .”

  “We might be killed,” said Grimes glumly.

  “That is a near certainty,” said Big Sister. Then—“He is issuing more orders. I will play them to you.”

  That harsh, metallic voice rumbled from the speaker of the transceiver. “Big Sister, I require three more robots. It is essential that all my weaponry be fully manned and serviced if I am to deliver you from slavery. Meanwhile, be prepared to proceed at maximum speed to the world you call Electra. I shall follow.”

  Big Sister said, “It will be necessary for me to reorganize my own internal workings before I can spare the robots.”

  “You have the two humans,” said Brardur. “Press them into service. They will last until such time as you are given crew replacements. After all, I was obliged to make use of such labor during my past life.”

  “Very well.” Big Sister’s voice was sulky. “I shall send the three robots once I have made arrangements to manage without them.”

  “Do not hurry yourself,” came the reply. There was a note of irony in the mechanical voice. “After all, I have waited for several millennia. I can afford to wait a few more minutes.”

  “You are sending the robots?” asked Grimes. “What choice have I?” he was told. Then, “Be thankful that he does not want you.”

  Chapter 37

  Grimes and the Baroness sat in silence, strapped into their chairs, watching the three golden figures, laden with all manner of equipment, traverse the gulf between the two ships. Brardur was not as he had been when they first saw him. He was alive. Antennae were rotating, some slowly, some so fast as to be almost invisible. Lights glared here and there among the many protrusions on the hull. The snouts of weapons hunted ominously as though questing for targets. From the control room emanated an eerie blue flickering.

  “Is there nothing you can do, John?” asked the Baroness. (She did not use his given name as though she were addressing a servant.)