Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III

by A Bertram Chandler

  He shouted urgently, “Look aft, all of you! Look aft!”

  He heard Lennay translate, heard Tamara demand, “Why?”

  “Don’t argue! Look aft!”

  The inertial drive hammered noisily as with his left hand he worked the directional controls. With his right hand he kept the stylus pressed firmly on to the firing stud. The continuous beam wouldn’t do the synthetic ruby any good but, with his eyes not tightly shut, he could not wait to fire until he was on the target. Suddenly, through his closed eyelids, he was conscious of a fierce, ruddy glow that ceased abruptly. It had not been as bad as he had feared; the automatic polarization had cut out most of the radiation.

  “You got them, Grimes!” Tamara shouted. “But there are more of the bastards to starboard!”

  He corrected the swing, set the pinnace turning the other way. He could see four drones in the light of what must have been the last rocket flare. They were not retreating. That was their funeral—or cremation—he thought viciously. Soon their exploded bodies would join the charred remains of their comrades.

  Now! he thought, starting to shut his eyes, but checking the lids in half descent. Those drones were lifting, obviously intending to fly over Little Sister to attack from the other side. He stopped the run, steadied, began to swing to port—but the drones did not reappear. “The cows must be going straight up,” he remarked conversationally.

  “The cows?” repeated Lennay in a puzzled voice but Grimes ignored him. He pushed the button to snap aside the metal screen of the overhead viewport. He stared into two faceted eyes that were staring down at him. He saw the muzzle of a laser pistol coming into view. Hastily he brought the screen into place and then screened the other ports.

  He could imagine the drones on top of the pinnace, probably clinging to the two laser cannon. They might have grenades. They did have hand lasers and they were already using them; a tell-tale light indicated overheating of the upper hull. They were trying to burn their way through. They would never give up the fight; their lives were already forfeit because of their failure to protect the princesses. Nothing remained to them but to die with honor.

  Fleetingly Grimes felt sorry for them. They were doing what they had to do. Although not unintelligent they had very little free will, were little better than motile organs of the far greater organism that was the Shaara Hive.

  And that was their bad luck.

  He slammed on vertical thrust. The inertial drive unit hammered away nosily in response. With all the viewports screened he could not see where he was going but it was highly improbable that there would be anything to impede his upward flight, and if there were the radar would give ample warning. His instruments told him that, save for two spots on the upper hull, skin temperature was dropping rapidly, had already fallen from 20∞ to 5∞, was still falling, as was the external air pressure. He would be above the overcast soon if not already. Skin temperature dropped from Zero to -10∞, the upper hull included.

  He thought smugly, That should have done it.

  He said, “We’ll give our friends time to cool off, then we’ll get back down.”

  “And what about my people, Captain Grimes?” asked Lennay.

  “Those drones are more of a menace to them than to us,” Grimes told him. “We have to be sure that all the Shaara are dead.”

  “Do you want these while you’re waiting?” asked Tamara. I found them stowed in a locker in the galley . . .”

  She handed him his pipe, his tobacco pouch and a box of the old-fashioned matches that he affected.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.” At that moment he really loved her.

  Then she spoiled everything by saying, “I was looking for the mail bag, actually. They’ve opened it, of course and one of the parcels, but the rest of the consignment’s intact.”

  Chapter 25

  GRIMES SLID THE SCREEN of the upper viewport to one side, ready to snap it back at the first sign of hostile life outside. He did not expect that there would be such. There was not. He was reasonably certain that the drones were no more impervious to a lethal combination of almost hard vacuum and extremely low temperature than humans would have been. He turned to the others, said, “All right. We’re going down.”

  “Please be fast, Captain,” said Lennay. “My men . . . they are injured, dying . . .”

  Or dead . . . thought Grimes. But as long as a spark of life remained in any of the raiding party speed was essential.

  He threw the inertial drive into neutral, dropped like the proverbial stone. He heard Tamara gasp, the Darrijans moan in fear. He watched the fast decreasing tally of kilometers on the radar altimeter screen—a diminishing numeration that very soon was that of meters only. At 30 he slammed on maximum vertical thrust. Little Sister was exceptionally robust; she could take this treatment but she didn’t have to like it. She complained bitterly with an agonized creaking of structural members while a veritable galaxy of red warning lights flashed on the console. She quivered to a halt ten meters from the ground, started to rise again. Grimes adjusted thrust while looking into the screen. Yes, there was the river, with the sandspit. Concentrations of metal—the barge, the guns—showed up brightly. Grimes spun the pinnace like a top about her short axis, made for them.

  ***

  Only one man had survived the Shaara counterattack. This was Tambu, Lennay’s chief clerk. He was wounded, a laser beam having slashed away the flesh from his right shoulder; had the injury not been instantly cauterized he would have died from loss of blood. He was unconscious but, said Lennay, would survive if he were taken without too much loss of time to the cave temple.

  Tamara asked, “How much time do we have, Grimes? How long before Baroom flies back to deal with us?”

  He said, “I don’t think that she’ll be back until the Rogue Queen has finished her business to the north.”

  “But she must know what’s happened here, that her people have been massacred.”

  “Not necessarily,” he told her.

  “But the Shaara are telepaths . . .”

  “And their telepathy is short range. For longer distances they rely on radio—among themselves they speak in coded stridulations. If they had a transceiver in the dome they may—they probably will—have gotten word of our attack through to the ship. But I suspect that the only radio here is that in Little Sister—in which case we have time to get ourselves organized.”

  “Tambu must be taken to the temple,” said Lennay stubbornly. “Also the bodies of our people must be carried there for proper crematory rites.”

  “They’ll keep,” said Grimes with a callousness that he did not feel. “So will Tambu. I’ve seen men recover from much worse wounds. If you like you can find some sterile dressings in the medicine chest for him. But we must make use of whatever time we have. First of all, I’m flying back to the dome. We must make a search, find out if there is a radio set inside it. If there is—it’s battle stations again. If there’s not, we collect up all the arms and ammunition, from the dome and from the Shaara dead, that will be of use to us. Then we fly back to the cave. But first of all,” he looked with extreme distaste at the bodies of the princess and the drone, still oozing a greenish, foul-scented ichor over what had been the spotlessly clean deck of the cabin, “we get these outside . . .”

  Lennay’s two men put the unconscious Tambu on to one of the bunks, then dragged the Shaara corpses out through the airlock. As soon as they had finished Grimes lifted the pinnace, flew back to the ruined dome. The rest of the ship cleaning could wait until later although, as soon as possible, he must disentangle those messily burst corpses from the twin laser cannon.

  ***

  Grimes went into the dome with Lennay and the other two Darijjans leaving Tamara, to whom electronic equipment was not strange, in charge of the pinnace. Should Little Sister’s radar show the approach of any space or aircraft she would let him know at once.

  Fortunately the plastic hemisphere was not fully deflated. Grimes and hi
s companions were able to crawl through tunnels and spherical chambers without too much difficulty, although even where there was headroom it was impossible to maintain an upright posture on the yielding floors. That odd diffused lighting was still on and through the almost transparent plastic of the interior walls Grimes could see the dark shapes of machines. Getting to them was the trouble; the inside of the dome was a three dimensional maze. But at last he was satisfied. One of those metallic shapes turned out to be a food dispenser and another doled out strictly rationed drops of some sort of syrup. The third and last one was only a drinking fountain. There were no weapons, although there were boxes of ammunition that would fit both the machine pistols and the light machine guns. To Grimes’ disappointment there was nothing—either banked power cells or any sort of generator—that could be used to recharge captured laser pistols. But this did not matter, he suddenly realized. Little Sister had power a-plenty.

  He made his way out of the dome followed by the Darijjans dragging their prizes. Back in the pinnace Tamara told him that there was still nothing on the radar screen and informed Lennay, who was making anxious enquiries, that Tambu was still sleeping. Everything was under control but for the passage of time. The night was almost over; the overcast sky was grey rather than black, was lightening with every passing minute. Sooner or later somebody would be coming down from the city to investigate the shooting—probably a military patrol, and the army leaders were pro-Shaara . . .

  But there were still things to be done. There were the weapons to be collected from the Shaara dead. There were the corpses of the killed guerrillas to be loaded aboard Little Sister. Grimes could appreciate Lennay’s concern but still thought that this was a criminal waste of time . . . He arranged to have the two surviving Darijjan soldiers make their way to the river between the rows of bushes, picking up what they could during their journey, while he flew Little Sister to the wreckage of the battery and its crew.

  Chapter 26

  THE SUN WAS WELL UP and the clouds had dispersed by the time that Grimes was almost ready to fly Little Sister away from the scene of the battle. The bodies of the Darijjans killed in the fighting had been loaded aboard, as had been the serviceable weapons taken from the Shaara corpses. All that remained was the clearing of the carcasses of the hapless drones from around the twin lasers. Grimes would not entrust this distasteful task to anybody but himself; a power connection could so easily be broken by anybody unfamiliar with such weaponry.

  He clambered up to the upper hull of the pinnace, using the handholds recessed into the shell plating just abaft the airlock. He looked with incipient nausea at the tangle of thin, hairy limbs, the tatters of chitin, the green ichor that was oozing disgustingly over the burnished metal. He gulped. But the job had to be done.

  Before starting he took a good look around. There was no traffic on the river. There were no machines, either native or Shaara, in the sky (if there had been his radar would have given him ample warning). But there was noise—mechanical, but not the arrhythmic beat of an inertial drive unit, not the whine of the electric motor of a Shaara blimp, not the throbbing of the engines of a Darijjan airship. It was a peculiar, wheezing rattle and seemed to be coming from ground level.

  Then Grimes saw them.

  They were between the city and the Shaara landing place, coming slowly but steadily. The sunlight was reflected from bright metal, was illuminating clouds of dark smoke mixed with white steam. Four vehicles, Grimes decided, steam-driven, and behind them what looked like cavalry. He shouted down, “Lennay! Come up here! Bring a pair of binoculars with you!”

  Lennay clambered up to where Grimes was standing with alacrity, handed him the powerful glasses. Grimes put them to his eyes, stared. There were four tall-funneled tractors, armored, rolling on huge, wide-rimmed wheels. Each towed behind it a truck in which men—soldiers almost certainly—were seated, stiffly erect, holding long rifles. The horsemen—although the beasts that they were riding were more like Terran camels—were similarly armed. Grimes switched his attention back to the vehicles. At the front end of each of them, forward of the engine, was a turret from which protruded the multiple muzzles of a heavy machine gun.

  Grimes handed the glasses to Lennay.

  “War wagons,” said the Darijjan.

  “It’s time that we weren’t here,” said Grimes.

  Lennay said, “Surely you have nothing to fear from our primitive weaponry, Captain?”

  Grimes told him, “There’s been enough killing. Too much. The Shaara, the Rogue Queen and her people, are the real enemies. Not your people.”

  Lennay said thoughtfully, “Perhaps you are right. If Samz is speaking through you, you are right, Captain Grimes. And it is possible that there are some of my men, of our men, among those soldiers . . . Perhaps if the gods deigned to display themselves . . .”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes dubiously. “Meanwhile, I’ll just have time to clear this mess away from around the guns before we have to use them.”

  “No,” said Lennay. “Leave the bodies there. They are proof that the sword of Delur is a mighty one . . .”

  “Were you talking to me?” asked Tamara who had joined the two men a-top the pinnace.

  “Yes, Lady Goddess.” (Grimes thought, He doesn’t address me in that tone of voice. But, of course, he’s too familiar with space captains to believe that they’re deities . . . Superintending Postmistresses are outside his past experience.) “Should you display yourself, standing triumphant on the torn carcasses of your foes, you will be a sign unto the faithful . . .”

  “You mean that you want me to ride on top of the pinnace? I suppose that if I stand between the two guns I shall be safe enough—as long as Grimes doesn’t indulge in aerobatics . . .”

  “Yes, Lady, between the cannon. Your feet on the bodies of your enemies. Your sword unsheathed. Your glorious body unclothed.”

  “That should not be necessary,” said Grimes.

  “But it is,” Lennay told him. “The Goddess Delur is always depicted naked in moments of triumph.”

  She said, “All right. I’ll go through with it. After all, those bastards have already seen me without a stitch on, and this time I shall at least have boots and a sword belt . . .”

  “Boots?” asked Grimes.

  “Boots. I’m not going to stand on that . . . mess in my bare feet.” She unbuckled her pistol belt, handed it to Lennay. Her sword belt followed. She whipped off her tunic. She was naked under it. The sword belt she put back on. She drew the weapon from its sheath, held it aloft. She asked, “How do I look?”

  “The very incarnation of Delur, my Lady,” said Lennay reverently.

  Like somebody out of a nude version of a Wagner opera, thought Grimes. Nonetheless, the effect was decidedly erotic.

  “I shall stay with you, Lady,” said Lennay. Grimes felt jealous but he was the only one capable of piloting the pinnace.

  “It will be necessary for me, as High Priest, to call out to the multitude.”

  If they can hear you over the clatter of the inertial drive, thought Grimes.

  “And now, Captain, if you will take your post at the controls and fly us towards the war wagons . . .”

  “I don’t like this,” said Grimes.

  She turned to face him, nude, imperious, her skin shining like gold in the sunlight reflected from the burnished hull of the pinnace. She said, “Fly towards the city, slowly, not too high. I want the people to see me.”

  “Suppose they shoot at you?”

  “They have no anti-aircraft weapons,” she said.

  But rifles can be aimed upwards, he thought.

  “Do as I say,” she commanded.

  It was a crazy idea, Grimes thought, but on this crazy planet it might just work. He resolved that if anything should happen to her he would exact bloody vengeance. He took one last look at her, standing between the twin cannon, her back to him, that absurd sword uplifted in her right hand, dazzlingly glittering, then clambered down to ground.r />
  ***

  He took his seat in the control cab, watched by the two Darijjans, both of whom had made themselves comfortable among the corpses of their late comrades. He decided to leave the airlock doors open; after all he would not be proceeding at any great speed or altitude. As the pinnace rose he saw that the forces from the city were just topping a low rise. Now was the time for them to open fire on him, if they were going to. But, of course, they would not know yet that the pinnace was not still under Shaara control. The armored tractors came into full view as he lifted—the locomotives and the troop trucks and, behind them, the cavalry. He flew towards them. He wondered what the soldiers were thinking. Perhaps they would assume that this was just another show put on for their benefit by the Shaara, yet another public humiliation of the Terrans. But they would soon realize that this was not so. The spectacle of the woman with the drawn sword, trampling on the crumpled bodies of those who had been her persecutors, was such obvious symbolism.

  He flew on, looking ahead and down. He could see that Tamara had been noticed (and who could fail to notice her?) by the soldiers. There was commotion in the open trucks being towed by the tractors. There was a burst of fire from one of the heavy machine guns with the bullets passing harmlessly below the pinnace. A cavalry officer had drawn his sword, was waving it, pointing it upwards. Some—by no means all—of the mounted men aimed their rifles at Little Sister, at Tamara. Grimes could only just see the muzzle flashes but the black powder smoke was visible enough.

  All right, he thought. You’ve asked for it. Now you get it. A slight touch on the controls would dip the pinnace’s nose and bring the laser cannon to bear. But he hesitated. Such a maneuver could well throw Tamara off balance and topple her from her airborne pedestal to the ground; the transition from Winged Victory to broken corpse would be sudden and irreversible. He wished that he had been able to rig some system of communication between himself and those on top of the pinnace, but there had been no time.