Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (71 page)

In the sitting room Damien, as though by right, seated himself behind the desk. Grimes looked at him resentfully, then took a chair facing the man who had once been his immediate boss.
He needs something to rest his elbows on,
thought Grimes,
so that he can make a really good production of steepling his fingers . . .
Damien did just that and regarded
Sister Sue’s
captain over the digital spire.

He said—and it was as much statement as question— “You have accepted the charter to El Dorado.”

“Yes, sir. Conditionally.”

“And your conditions?”

“My promotion to captain if I reenter the Survey Service.”

“That has been approved. You are now Captain John Grimes, Federation Survey Service Reserve. The necessary documentation should be aboard shortly.”

“I haven’t finished yet, sir. I have a particularly awkward second officer and I’d like to get shot of her.”

“That young lady in the airlock? A Donegalan, isn’t she?”

“Yes. She’s got the Guild on her side and I’ll be involved in wrongful dismissal suit if I empty her out.”

“Then you don’t empty her out, Grimes. It Is essential that you lift on time for El Dorado.”

“Mphm. Well, I was hoping to pick up a third mate here. That would improve matters. At the moment the Green Hornet is fifty percent of my control-room staff. But the Guild doesn’t seem to be in a mood to help me . . .”

“I wonder why not,” said Damien sardonically. “You know, of course, that all telephone calls made out from the Naval Station are monitored? No? Well, you know now. But not to worry, Grimes. I have already made arrangements for additional personnel for you. A Mr. Venner, who holds the rank of a Reserve Lieutenant Commander, will be applying to you for employment. He is a Guild member, of course, so there should be no difficulties. You will also be carrying a passenger—although actually he will be under your orders. If merchant vessels still carried psionic communications officers he would be on your books—but if you signed him on as PCO it would look suspicious.”

“A PCO, sir?”

“Yes. A Mr. Mayhew. Or Lieutenant Commander Mayhew.”

“Mphm. And I suppose that your Lieutenant Commander Venner has some skills not usually possessed by the average merchant officer.”

“He has, Grimes. His speciality is unarmed combat—and combat using any and all material to hand, however unlikely, as a weapon.”

“I remember one instructor, when I did a course,” said Grimes, “who demonstrated on a lifelike dummy the amount of damage you can do with a pipe . . .”

“Iron pipe? Lead pipe?”

“No, sir. This sort of pipe,” said Grimes, filling and lighting his.

“By asphyxiation?” asked Damien.

“
No.”
Grimes made a stabbing gesture. “Used as a dagger.”

“A poisoned dagger at that. Tell me, what arms do you carry aboard this ship?”

“A Minetti projectile pistol. Two hand lasers. That’s all.”

“And that’s all that there will be.
Sister Sue
is not a warship.”

“But, now, commanded by a Survey Service Reserve officer and with two other Survey Service officers on board.”

“Agreed. But you must be wondering, Grimes, just what all this is about.”

“Too right, sir.”

“You’ve been to El Dorado, haven’t you? You know the sort of people who live there. The filthy rich. You may have noticed that no matter how rich such people are they always want to be richer. And, too, there’s the lust for power. Your old friend Drongo Kane is in many ways a typical El Doradan, although he was granted citizenship only recently. Before he became an El Doradan he attempted to take over an entire planet, Morrowvia. You were able to shove a spanner into his works. He tried again, on the same world, some years later. Again you were on hand, as master of the Baroness d’Estang’s spaceyacht. The Baroness, an El Doradan, was well aware of Kane’s criminality. Nonetheless she married him . . .”

“I think that she rather regrets it now.”

“Does she? Oh, she got you out of a nasty mess on New Venusberg rather against her ever-loving husband’s wishes, but that doesn’t mean that a marriage dissolution is imminent.

“Well, we have learned that he has interested his El Doradan fellow citizens in another scheme of his, an ambitious one although not involving territorial acquisition. As you may know, El Dorado now has a navy . . .”

“One ship,” said Grimes. “An auxiliary cruiser, usually employed as a cruise liner, with Commodore Baron Kane as the captain.”

“Correct. But El Dorado, through Kane, has been chartering sundry obsolescent tonnage and not so obsolescent weaponry.”

“And upon whom is El Dorado going to declare war?”

“Nobody. But, as you know, there are always brushfire wars going on somewhere in the galaxy. Recently the Duchy of Waldegren put down a breakaway attempt by one of its colonies. The Shaara Galactic Hive has done the same, more than once. In such cases the rebel colonists have been outgunned and easily beaten. But suppose such rebels had been able to employ a mercenary navy?”

“Mercenaries like to be paid,” said Grimes. “Mercenaries with warships expect much higher pay than do, say, infantrymen.”

“Agreed. Now, just suppose that you’re the king or president or whatever of some world that’s decided to break away from whichever empire it’s supposed to belong. Your imperial masters take action against you. Your trade routes are raided, your merchant ships destroyed or captured. And then somebody presents himself at your palace, cap in hand, offering his services. At a price. It’s a price that you can’t afford to pay, especially since the salesman makes it quite clear that he’s not interested in the paper money that’s being churned out by your printing presses. But he makes a proposition. He offers his services free. Free to
you
, that is. All that you have to do is to issue Letters of Marque to his ships, which then become privateers. As such they raid the imperial trade routes, capturing rather than destroying. Your own navy, such as it is, is then free to deal with the imperial navy while the privateers make their fortunes harrying the merchantmen.”

“Mphm.”

“Now I’m demoting you, Grimes. You’re no longer this rebel king or prince or duke. You’re just the owner-master of a scruffy star tramp, delivering a cargo to El Dorado and not knowing where the next cargo is coming from. Or going to. You know people on El Dorado. You know Kane. He knows you. It may surprise you to learn that he has quite a high opinion of you. Or a low opinion. He’s been heard to say, ‘They call
me
a pirate—but that bloody Grimes could give me points and a beating if he really set his mind to it!’” He laughed. “And he could be right!”

“I’m flattered,” said Grimes, making it plain that he was not.

“I thought that you would be,” said Damien. “And I don’t mind telling you that Kane’s opinion of yourself coincides with mine.”

“Thank you. Sir.” Grimes scowled even more heavily. “So the idea is that I join Kane’s ragamuffin navy and then, somehow, switch sides.”

“More or less, although I don’t visualize any overt side switching. Hopefully you will contrive an incident, do something that will give us, the Federation Survey Service, an excuse to clamp down on the privateers. As you are aware, no doubt, the dividing line between privateer and pirate has always been a very thin one. You will, as instructed, break that line. You should be able to do so without any loss of life or injuries on either side, without, even, any serious damage to property—but you will commit an act of piracy. A suitable vessel to become the victim of your depredations has already been selected. She will, of course, carry a PCO who will, of course, be in telepathic touch with your Mr. Mayhew.”

“Very ingenious, sir,” said Grimes without enthusiasm. “And I suppose that I shall be secretly under Survey Service orders, as will be Mr. Venner and Mr. Mayhew. But what about the rest of my crew? Two refugees from an old men’s home. University professors and glorified garage hands for engineers. I can’t see any of them taking kindly to a career of piracy.”

“Privateering, Grimes, privateering. And you’d be surprised—or would you?—at what people will do when the money is big enough. And they’ll think that there’s no risk involved, that it will just be a matter of capturing unarmed vessels.”

“When a state of war exists, sir, merchant vessels are usually defensively armed.”

“You needn’t tell your people that.”

“The real spacemen will know without my telling them. And Billy Williams, my chief officer, was in the Dog Star Line—and
they
have always made a practice of arming their ships when they’re running through trouble zones.”

“So much the better. It will mean that you’ll have three reasonably competent gunnery officers aboard
Sister Sue
—yourself, Williams and Venner.”

“You’re forgetting one thing, sir.”

“And what’s that, Grimes?”

“I have a conscience. I don’t mind hiring myself out as a mercenary but I like to be able to approve of my employers.”

“Until this mess has been cleaned up, Grimes,
we
, the Federation Survey Service, are your real employers.”

“There have been times, Admiral Damien, when I have not approved of the Survey Service.”

“You do not surprise me. Many times I strongly suspected that. Nonetheless, you have never approved of Kane. This will be your chance to pay off old scores.”

And that, thought Grimes, was one quite good reason for accepting the assignment. Another reason was the prospect of making an honest, or a dishonest, profit. And—although he would never admit this to Damien—the Survey Service had been his life for so long that the prospect of returning to it, even as only a temporary reservist, was almost like coming home.

Chapter 16

ALTHOUGH THE DISCHARGE
of
Sister Sue’s
inward cargo had been only two days’ work, with no overtime involved, there was a delay of over a week before her loading for El Dorado could be started. Grimes took advantage of this respite to fly to Alice Springs to visit his parents. Williams could be trusted to look after things during the captain’s absence and Damien had raised no objections. (Grimes wondered if legally the Rear Admiral could have done so but deemed it polite to ask his permission before leaving Port Woomera.)

The city of Alice Springs had changed little since Grimes’ last time there. There were, he thought as the dirigible made its approach from the south and he looked out and down through the promenade deck windows, a few more white domes in the residential districts, an increase of the market garden acreage, vividly green in the desert, crisscrossed by shining irrigation canals. There seemed to have been a proliferation of the grey yet scintillant solar power collection screens.

His father and mother were waiting for him in the lounge at the base of the mooring mast. His maternal parent had changed very little; she was still tall and straight and slim, still with gleaming auburn hair that owed little to artifice. But his father had aged, more so than had been apparent in the small screen of the telephone when Grimes had called from Port Woomera. He, too, was tall but stooped and his abundant hair was white. His face was heavily lined. Yet the old boy, thought Grimes, looked prosperous enough. His historical romances must be paying him well.

They boarded the family electric runabout and drove to the Grimes home on the outskirts of the city, Matilda Grimes at the controls while the two men sat and talked in the back. His parents, Grimes discovered, had moved to a much larger house, one surrounded by a lush, sprinkler-fed garden. When the car stopped, a housebot of the latest model emerged to handle the baggage and contrived somehow to register disapproval of the single, small, battered case brought by the guest.
Another uppity robot,
thought Grimes, but said nothing.

Finally the three humans disposed themselves in the comfortably furnished sitting room, sipping the fragrant tea that Mrs. Grimes had made personally. “There are some things,” she said, “that robots just can’t do properly.” Her son agreed with her.

Afternoon tea gave way to pre-dinner drinks as the colors of the garden, seen through the wide picture window, dimmed and darkened in the fast gathering twilight. But not every plant faded into near invisibility. Grimes was pleased to see that the Mudooran sparkle bush that, as little more than a seedling, he had brought to his parents as a gift had not only survived but flourished, was now a small tree decorated with starlike blossoms, softly self-luminous, multicolored.

His mother saw what he was looking at.

She said, “We have always loved that bush, John. We’ve told ourselves that as it survived in what, to it, is an alien environment so you would survive. And, like it, you have not only survived but done well. A captain
and
a shipowner.” She frowned slightly. “But I still wish that you could have become a captain in the Survey Service.”

Grimes laughed. “So you still think that your illustrious ancestor . . .”

“And yours!” she snapped.

“. . . would not have approved of my career. You’d have liked to have seen me become Admiral Lord Grimes, just as he became Admiral Lord Hornblower. But unless I emigrate to the Empire of Waverley I’ll never become a lord. Not that I can imagine King James elevating me to the peerage.”

“But John
was
a captain in the Survey Service,” said the elder Grimes.

“At times,” his wife told him, “you display an appalling ignorance of naval matters, inexcusable in one who is not only an historical novelist but who prides himself on the thoroughness of his research. John was captain of a Serpent Class courier—but his actual rank was only lieutenant. He was captain of bigger ships—first as a lieutenant commander, then as commander. But he never wore the four gold rings on his sleeve.”

George Whitley Grimes laughed. “Anybody who is in command is a captain, no matter what he does or does not wear. What do you say, John?”

“I’m a captain,” said Grimes. “I’m called that.”

“But a
merchant
captain,” said his mother. “It’s only a courtesy title. And the uniform you wear is only company’s livery.”