Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III

by A Bertram Chandler

  “Take your time, Grimes,” said Lania sarcastically.

  “Take your time, Captain,” said Mortdale, without irony. “Make sure that everything is as it should be.” To Lania he remarked, “A good commander takes nothing for granted, Highness.”

  “There’s one thing that he can take for granted,” snapped the Crown Princess. “And that’s that he’ll get his head blown off if he attempts anything that he shouldn’t. All right, Grimes, get us away from here.”

  Grimes strapped himself into the command chair. He said into the intercom microphone, “All hands stand by for lift-off. Secure all.”

  “All has been secured,” said the general.

  The inertial drive muttered irritably and then commenced its arrhythmic hammering. The noise, thanks to sonic insulation, was not too loud in either the control room or the accommodation. Grimes wondered if anybody had thought to insulate the cargo holds, which were now troop decks. He rather hoped that this had not been done. It would make him a little happier to know that Paul’s and Lania’s loyal soldiers would be experiencing a thoroughly uncomfortable passage.

  Bronson Star heaved her clumsy bulk off the gibber plain, clawed for the sky. She lifted complainingly. Grimes doubted that the weight of her cargo, animate and inanimate, had been properly distributed. But the Commission’s Epsilon Class star tramps were sturdy workhorses and could stand considerable abuse.

  She groaned and grumbled into the black, star-spangled sky. As on the occasion of her landing there was no communication with Aerospace Control. Grimes wondered what report, what complaints would be made by the captain of the big airliner, a dirigible ablaze with lights, that passed within ten kilometers of the climbing spaceship; even though Bronson Star was not exhibiting the regulation illuminations, she would have shown up as an enormous blip on the aircraft’s radar screen.

  She drove through the last, tenuous wisps of atmosphere, out and up, through the Van Allens, established herself in orbit. Grimes was busy, as was the computer, presenting him with the coordinates of the target star. There was Free Fall when the inertial drive was shut off, centrifugal effects while the directional gyroscopes turned the ship about her axes, temporal disorientation when the Mannschenn Drive propagated its artificial, warped continuum about the vessel. Inertial drive again, and a comfortable one-gravity acceleration . . .

  “Back to your kennel, Grimes,” said Lania.

  Chapter 11

  GRIMES could not help worrying.

  Even though he felt nothing but dislike for Paul and Lania and their people—with one possible exception—he still felt responsible for them. He was not the only spaceman aboard the ship—the original skyjackers must have received some sort of training before being employed in orbital vehicles and Hodge had served in deep space vessels—but he was the only master astronaut. During the voyage from Bronsonia to Porlock he had not been overly concerned; the life-support systems had been required to serve the needs of only five persons. But now . . . It is axiomatic that the more people there are aboard a ship the more things there are that can go wrong. Somebody should be making rounds at regular intervals. Somebody should be seeing to it that the departmental heads—Hodge and Susie?—were doing their jobs efficiently. Somebody should be inspecting the troop decks to ensure that conditions were reasonably hygienic. In Grimes’ experience even marines, for all their spit and polish, could not be trusted to maintain a high standard of personal cleanliness. And these soldiers that the ship was carrying were not marines, were only irregulars although, presumably, General Mortdale had been an officer in the army of Dunlevin prior to the revolution.

  Then—to hell with them, thought Grimes. After all he was not legally responsible for anything. His name was not on the Register as Master of this ship; he had been employed only as a glorified watchman. He wanted to stay alive himself, of course, but could hardly care less what happened to his captors. He would be able to tell, he thought, if there were a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or if the water-purification system were not functioning properly. If he suspected that things were going wrong he would tell Susie when she brought him his food.

  One of the worst features of his incarceration was never knowing, except on the occasions when he was brought up to Control for navigation, what the time was. Sometimes it seemed only minutes between meals, sometimes far too many hours. He was never sure when he should be sleeping or reading—not that there was anything worth reading—or exercising. (He tried to keep himself in reasonably good condition by push-ups and sit-ups and toe-touchings, all that he could manage in his cramped quarters.)

  He was having a shower. (It was one way of passing the time.) He washed his shirt and shorts, hung them to dry in the warm air blast. He stepped through from the little bathroom into the not much larger cabin just as the door opened and Susie stepped in. He glimpsed Hodge in the alleyway outside as the door shut. He heard the click of the padlock closing.

  He was conscious of his nakedness but he had no towel to wrap about himself and he was damned if he was going to put on his wet shorts and shirt for anybody.

  “Come in,” he said sarcastically. “Don’t mind the way I’m dressed. This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.”

  Then he realized that she was in a very distressed state, her face white, her mouth trembling. Her shirt was ripped, exposing her right breast. She was holding her shorts, the waistband of which had been ripped, up with one hand.

  “What happened, Susie?” he demanded.

  She stared at him wildly then whispered, “Hodge thought that I’d be safe here as long as nobody else knows . . .”

  “But what happened?”

  She tried to pull herself together. “A party, in the officers’ mess . . . That band of heroes . . .” A spark of humor was showing through. “All for one and one for all . . . The trouble was that I was supposed to be the one . . .”

  “But surely the general . . .”

  “His officers can do no wrong.”

  “Or Paul, and Lania . . .”

  “Lania’s never forgiven me for having been Paul’s lover . . . And Paul? He’s well under her thumb . . .”

  Then she screamed, tried to hide herself behind Grimes. He was acutely conscious of that bare breast pressing against the naked skin of his back. The door opened. It was Hodge again.

  He grunted, “Grimes’ tucker time, ain’t it? Here’s sandwiches an’ a bottle o’ plonk. Enough for both of you.”

  “And what about. . . them?” whispered Susie.

  “They’re happy enough now. They got those hen sergeants up. The last I saw of the party they certainly weren’t missing you. But you’re safer out of sight for a while.” He leered, but somehow not offensively. He thrust the burdened tray into Grimes’ hands, saying, “Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.”

  He turned and left, shutting the door decisively behind him.

  Grimes put the laden tray down on the desk. Susie sat down on the narrow bunk. She pulled a packet of cigarillos from the breast pocket of her shirt—the side that was not torn—put one of the slim, brown cylinders in her mouth with a hand that had almost stopped trembling, puffed it into ignition. She extended the pack to Grimes. “Smoke, Captain?”

  “Thank you.”

  He lit up.

  She regarded him through the eddying fumes. She managed a slight smile. She said, “If anybody had told me, while I was a stewardess in the Met. Service, that I’d feel safe locked up in a dogbox with a hairy-arsed space captain I’d have called him a bloody liar.”

  “Mphm.” Grimes put an exploratory hand to his smooth buttocks. “I’m not hairy,” he said.

  “A figure of speech.”

  She got up from the bunk, brushed past Grimes to get to the desk. She unscrewed the plastic cap—large enough to be used as a cup—of the bottle, filled it. She said, “I have to admit that General Mortdale’s senior mess sergeant can do things with an autochef. Here. Try it.” />
  Grimes sipped cautiously. This was his first alcoholic drink for a very long time. It was a fortified wine, not too sweet, with a not unpleasant flavor and aroma that he could not identify. He sipped again, with less caution.

  Susie took the cup from him, raised it to her own lips. “To a glorious restoration,” she said. She drank. “And death and destruction to the enemies of our gracious prince and his princess.” She drank again. “And may they always be successful in protecting the tender bodies of their loyal female subjects from their brutal and licentious soldiery!”

  “They haven’t had much success so far,” said Grimes nastily.

  “And don’t I bloody well know it, John! (You don’t mind, do you?)” She refilled the cup. “I’m neither a virgin nor a prude—but I do draw the line at pack rape. And I do think that Their High and Mightinesses should take a damn sight more interest in what their gallant soldiers get up to. This effort tonight wasn’t the first time, you know. I’ve been fighting those bastards off ever since they came aboard on Porlock, knowing all the time that the only one to whom I could look to help was Hodge.”

  “Then why did you go to the party?”

  “Lania—Her Highness—told me that as the catering officer of this noble vessel I must be there to see that the pongoes didn’t starve or die of thirst . . .”

  “You’re in no danger of doing the latter,” said Grimes.

  “Sorry, John.” She took a swig from the refilled cup, then handed it to him. “But as I was saying—I do draw the line at pack rape. And at being beaten up for foreplay. Look!” She stripped off her torn shirt, stepped out of her shirt, peeled down her minimal underwear. She pointed at a dark bruise on the pale skin of her upper right thigh, at another on her round belly, another one just below the prominent pink nipple of her left breast.

  Suddenly Grimes felt a flood of sympathy. Until now he had not really believed the girl’s story, had been asking himself how much of the girl’s distress was genuine, how much mere play acting. But those bruises were real enough.

  He said with feeling, “The bastards! I wish . . .”

  She laughed shakily. “You wish that you had the authority to throw them into the brig, or even out of the airlock without a spacesuit! I wish it too. But it makes me a little happier to think that the bloody general and his bloody colonels and majors got nowhere with me, whereas you . . .”

  The invitation was unmistakable. Grimes looked at her. Those bruises may have been ugly but they somehow accentuated the sexuality of her abundant nakedness. Her eyes were wide, staring at his own nudity. He felt himself responding. Her scarlet mouth, with its smeared lip pigment, was wide, inviting—but the thought of the mouths of the drunken soldiers crushed to hers almost put him off. He put the cup down on the desk, stooped to pick up her torn shirt, used it to wipe her face.

  She laughed shakily, “Gods! You’re a fastidious bastard, John! But I don’t blame you. I like you for it. And I’m clean where it counts.”

  He dropped the ripped garment, pulled her to him. If he had not enjoyed an alcoholic drink for a long time it was even longer since he had enjoyed a woman. And then, unbidden, the memory of how his sexuality had initiated the chain of circumstances culminating in his present predicament rose to the surface of his mind.

  If it had not been for that erotic dream and those obscene animals . . . His erection began to die.

  But he was determined to take what was being offered to him. The woman in the dream, he reasoned, had been darkly auburn, with deeply sun-bronzed skin . . . The actual woman in his arms was blonde, pale-skinned, ample, not slender.

  They kissed—and his first contact of sensitive membranes drove the horrible memories back into the pit from which they had risen. She was not only a woman but a new woman, a new—to him—kind of woman. There was a resilient softness such as he had never experienced before; all of his past loves had tended to be small breasted, slender limbed.

  She fell backward onto the bunk, pulling him with her. He was on her, in her. The coupling was fast—too fast—explosive, mutually unsatisfying. She squirmed from under him, got to her feet, smiled down at him. She said, “You’ll have to do better next time, John.” She refilled the wine cup, brought it to him. They shared the liquor and a cigarillo, saying little. Then, stretched beside him, gently and unhurriedly, her mouth and hands skillful, she brought him to a fresh arousal.

  The second time was better, much better. They made love unhurriedly, experimentally, inventively, deferring the climax again and again. At last they could hold out no longer. Then, simultaneously (it seemed) they fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.

  They awoke. Grimes was hungry. The sandwiches were inclined to be stale now but there was some wine left to wash them down. After the meal, such as it was, Susie went through to the bathroom. Grimes heard the shower running and then, above the sound of descending water, the noise of somebody making a fuss of opening the padlock outside the door.

  Hodge came in. He grinned at Grimes, said cheerfully, “Their party’s over. They’re sleeping it off. An’ how was your party, Grimes?”

  Grimes said, “Thank you for the wine.”

  “Is that all you’re thanking me for?” The engineer was looking pointedly at the obviously fresh stains on the mattress cover. “Oh, Susie!”

  “Yes?” came her voice from the bathroom.

  “I brought you a fresh uniform from your cabin. The one that you were wearing when I saw you last looked a bit tattered. It’s probably worse now.” He put the bundle of clothing on the bunk then called, “I’ll wait outside till you’re dressed.”

  He left the cabin. Susie came out from the bathroom. She looked rather sluttish with her hair still wet from the shower—but, thought Grimes, none the worse for that.

  She slowly put on the fresh shirt, saying, “Dear Hodge . . . I don’t know what I’d have done without him . . .” She noticed Grimes’ jealous expression, laughed. “He’s my half-brother. Father played around a bit in his younger days.”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes.

  She stepped into her shorts. She was one of those women, thought Grimes, who looked better naked. Dressed, she was just another plump girl.

  He went into the bathroom. The shorts and shirt that he had hung up to dry were damp again; Susie had not thought to shift them to where they would be safe from her splashings. But he put them on. They would dry out on his body soon enough.

  When he reentered the cabin Susie was talking with Hodge. They turned to face Grimes. Susie said, “Are you with us, John?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “From now on we’re looking after ourselves. We’ve decided that Paul and Lania have forfeited all claims to our loyalty.”

  “Why did you join up with them in the first place?” asked Grimes.

  “We didn’t know what they’d be like once they started to rise to what they think are their rightful positions. We didn’t know what their supporters—if that mob from Porlock are any sample—were really like. But we know now.

  “Oh, we’ll play along for the time being. We have to. But we’ll watch how the cards fall. If we see a chance to take a trick or two for ourselves we grab it.

  “And you, John?”

  He said, “If I were being paid I’d be only the hired help. But as I’m not being paid I’m not even that. All that I want is to get back to Bronsonia and my own ship.”

  “Stick with us,” she told him, “and you might do just that.”

  Chapter 12

  GRIMES SAID, “I don’t see how I can refuse to land on Dunlevin. But surely there will be some opposition. I can’t imagine a convenient Aerospace Controllers’ strike, such as there was on Porlock; on highly regimented, socialist planets you just don’t strike if you know what’s good for your health . . .”

  Susie and Hodge sat side by side on the settee, watching him as he ate his meal from the tray on the desk, listening to him as he talked between mouthfuls.

  Grimes went
on, “All that I know about Dunlevin is from those propaganda magazines that you brought me, Susie. They can hardly be classed as pilot books. They don’t tell me what artificial satellites are in orbit about Dunlevin. There must be some. Are they armed? After the way in which the Duchy of Waldegren attempted to intervene in the civil war I should be very surprised if they aren’t. Are they manned?”

  He took and chewed another mouthful, swallowed.

  “And talking of that—I’ve been meaning to ask for some time—just why does Bronsonia have manned meterological satellites while almost every other world makes do with fully automated stations in orbit?”

  “The Jobs For Humans movement was very powerful on Bronsonia,” said Hodge. “It still is, come to that. But there were some jobs that the humans didn’t find all that attractive. That’s why the met. stations are manned by almost unemployables . . .”

  “Speak for yourself,” snapped Susie.

  “. . . and misfits, such as ourselves and Their Sublime Highnesses.”

  “Mphm. But to return to Dunlevin . . . Almost certainly orbital forts, probably manned. A continuous long-range radar watch. Mass Proximity Indicators? No. When you’re sitting on, or in relatively close orbit about, something with the mass of a planet that mass is the only mass that registers. So, as long as we’re making our approach under interstellar drive we’re undetected—but once we break through into the normal continuum people are liable to start throwing bricks at us . . .”

  “Anybody would think,” said Susie, “that you want to make a successful landing on Dunlevin.”