Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (26 page)

He told Susie, “Take over the NST. Keep ’em talking. I have to make sure that we stayed relatively put . . .”

Back in his command chair he used lateral thrust to keep the city lights coincident with the bull’s eye of the screen. He watched the altimeter figures steadily climbing. He heard Susie saying into the microphone, “We are neutrals. We were skyjacked by Prince Paul and General Mondale. We were forced, at gunpoint, to bring them and their soldiers here . . .”

“You must return for questioning. No harm will come to you if you are innocent . . .”

“You have no jurisdiction over a Bronsonian spaceship . . .”

“When she is in our airspace we have. Return to the surface at once.”

“Ask them,” said Grimes, “ ‘
Straight down?
’”

Susie did so. She laughed. Grimes laughed—then remembered that he still had to get past the orbital forts. No matter what his position would be relative to Dunlevin’s surface a cloud of radioactive dust and gases above the stratosphere would be little worry to anybody at ground level.

Chapter 16

HE HAD HOPED
that the royalist invaders would create enough of a diversion to distract attention from
Bronson Star’s
getaway. He had strongly suspected that the landing would not be a great surprise to the rulers of Dunlevin; he had not anticipated that the invading force, in its entirety, would be wiped out by nuclear blast. (Surely there could have been no survivors.) He had envisaged a nasty little battle but with fatal casualties deliberately kept to a minimum so that there could be a show trial afterward with public humiliation of Paul, Lania and their adherents. But military and political leaders do not always see eye to eye—and the military have always been prone to use steam hammers to squash gnats.

Meanwhile—how trigger happy were the crews of the fortress satellites? Would they shoot first and ask questions afterward or would they try to talk
Bronson Star
into surrender? (Their Air Force colleagues had given up the chase saying, before they turned away, “You’ve had your chance. You’ll never get past the forts.”) Did the satellite crews know about the Gunderson Gambit? It was supposed to be a closely guarded secret of the Federation Survey Service—but Mortdale knew (had known) about it. And if Mortdale had known . . .

“Susie,” he asked urgently, “was the general ever in the Marines? The Federation Survey Service Marines, that is . . .”

“Why do you ask, John? He’s dead now. What does it matter what he was.”

Cold-blooded little bitch!
thought Grimes angrily. The general, with all his faults, had been more of Grimes’ breed of cat than Paul and Lania or, come to that, Susie and Hodge.

“This is important,” he said. “Was he ever in the Marines?”

“Yes,” she admitted sulkily. “Quite a few of the refugees, the military types, entered Federation service. He got as high as colonel, I believe . . .”

And as a colonel, thought Grimes, he’d have had access to all manner of classified information. He hoped that there were no ex-colonels of Marines in the satellites. It was extremely unlikely that there would be.

He said, “Put the radar on long range. See if you can pick up any of the orbital forts.”

She said, “There’re all sorts of bloody blips—some opening, some closing. They could be
anything
.”

“They probably are,” said Grimes.

Then again a strange voice came from the transceiver. “
Fortress Castro
to
Bronson Star.
This is your last chance. Inject yourself into closed orbit and prepare to receive our boarding party—or we open fire!”

“You can’t!” cried Susie to Grimes.

“I have to,” he said. “Look at the gauges. You wouldn’t be able to breathe what’s outside the ship but it’s still more atmosphere than vacuum. I can’t risk the Gunderson Gambit—yet.”

He had anticipated this very situation, reasoned that a show of compliance would be the only way to avoid instant destruction. Already he had thrown the problem into the lap of the computer; all that he had to do now was switch over from manual to automatic control.

“Inject into orbit!” came the voice of
Fortress Castro
. “We are tracking you. Inject into orbit—or . . .”

“Tell them that we’re injecting,” said Grimes to Susie.

He threw the switch, heard and felt the arrhythmic hammering of the drive as
Bronson Star
was pushed away from her outward and upward trajectory. He hoped that
Fortress Castro’s
commander was relying more upon the evidence presented by his computer than the display in his radar tank. It would be some time before the ship’s alteration of course would be visually obvious.

He got up from the command chair, went to his own radar. That large blip must be the orbital fort, that tiny spark moving away from it, toward the center of the screen, the vehicle carrying the boarding party. He turned his attention from the tank to the board with the array of telltale gauges; the dial at which he looked registered particle contact rather than actual pressure. Outside the ship there was vacuum to all practical intents and purposes—the practical intents and purposes of air-breathing organisms. But the sudden—it would have to be sudden—propagation of a temporal precession field would mean the catastrophic, intimate intermingling of those sparsely scattered atoms and molecules, those charged particles, with all matter, living and inanimate, within the ship.

At this distance from the planet the risk was still too great.

Grimes stared into the radar tank. Would
Bronson Star
reach apogee before the shuttle caught her? Would he be justified in using thrust, to drive the ship to a higher altitude in a shorter time? He decided against this.
Fortress Castro’s
computer would at once notify the shuttle’s commander—and that vehicle was close enough now to use its light weaponry, automatic guns firing armor-piercing bullets that would pierce the shell of the unarmored
Bronson Star
with contemptuous ease, crippling her but not destroying.

“What the hell’s going on up there?” came Hodge’s voice from the intercom.

“We are temporarily in orbit,” said Grimes. “I shall initiate Mannschenn Drive as soon as possible.”

“I hope,” said Susie—who, as a spaceperson of sorts, was beginning to get some grasp of the situation— “that it will be soon enough.”

“Shuttle to
Bronson Star
,” came a fresh voice from the NST transceiver. “Have your after airlock ready to receive boarders.”

“Willco,” said Susie, looking at Grimes, her eyebrows raised in unspoken query.

He grinned at her with a confidence that he did not feel.

The ship’s computer, pre-programmed, took over. Grimes had forgotten to instruct it to sound any sort of warning before starting the Mannschenn Drive. He heard the hum of the rotors as they commenced to spin, the faint murmur that rapidly rose to a high-pitched whine. He saw colors sag down the spectrum, the warped perspective. And it was as though the control room had been invaded by a swarm of tiny, luminous bees, each miniscule but intense flare the funeral pyre of a cancelled-out atom. But there was no damage done—not to Susie, not to himself, not to the ship. And not, he hoped, to Hodge.

The pyrotechnic display abruptly ceased.

Grimes pulled his vile pipe out of his pocket, filled and lit it, looked up and out of the familiar—comforting now rather than frightening—blackness with the writhing, iridescent nebulosities that, in normal spacetime, were the stars.

He said, “As soon as the mass proximity indicator shows that there’s nothing dangerously close we’ll set trajectory. And then . . . Bronsonia, here we come!”

“Not so fast,” said Susie, her voice oddly cold. “Not so fast.
You
have only a few fines to pay on Bronsonia. Hodge and I face life imprisonment or rehabilitation. And that—need I tell you?—is just another word for personality wiping.”

Chapter 17

BRONSON STAR
broke away from Dunlevin without further incident. She was bound, at first, for nowhere in particular. Her inertial drive was running only to provide a comfortable half-standard gravity, her Mannschenn Drive was in operation only to make it virtually impossible for any Dunlevin warships—the Free People’s Navy did, Grimes knew, possess two obsolescent frigates—to intercept her.

Grimes, Hodge and Susie sat around the table in the wardroom. There was coffee—not very good. There was a bottle of some unnamed liqueur that had been distilled by the late General Mortdale’s senior mess sergeant. Grimes, sipping the smooth, potent and palatable fluid, rather hoped that the noncommissioned officer had survived the Bacon Bay debacle; as he had been one of the two men left with Major Briggs to keep guard on the ship this was possible. The drugged soldiers had been dumped from the airlock, onto the beach, shortly prior to lift-off.

Grimes raised his glass in a toast. “Here’s to Sergeant Whoever-He-Is. Here’s to his continuing good health.”

Susie said, a little sourly, “He was a good cook and even better at persuading the autochef to produce liquor. But I can’t help feeling a bit sorry that we didn’t kill the pongoes before we threw them out.”

“Too many people died,” said Grimes. “I rather hope that Briggs and the two sergeants didn’t.”

“And if they didn’t,” said Susie, “and if they were taken prisoner, they’ll sing. They’ll sing like a male voice trio—or, if the Free People’s Secret Police is as bad as the Royalist Underground makes out, like a soprano trio.”

“So,” asked Grimes, “what?” He lifted and lit his pipe then continued. “Nobody on Dunlevin thinks that
Bronson Star
lifted off all by her little self. They know that she must have had a crew.”

“And now,” said Susie, “they know who was in the crew. The Underground will know—and what the Underground knows the royalist refugee enclaves on Bronsonia, Porlock and a few other planets will soon know.”

“With your share of the salvage money you should be able to buy protection,” said Grimes. “That’s why I think we should return to Bronsonia as soon as possible. We—the three of us—won this ship back from Paul and Lania and their mob. Even though I was, at the time of the original seizure, employed by
Bronson Star’s
owners, I was, legally, neither master nor crew member. My name was on neither the Articles nor the Register. The salvage claim should stick.”

“And you want your share,” said Susie, “to pay your fines and port dues so that you can get your own little ship back.”

“Of course,” agreed Grimes.

“I see your point, John. But you’re not a known criminal. Hodge and I are. There was the first skyjacking, remember. The met. satellite. Captain Walvis will not have forgotten how I massaged the back of his neck with a pistol muzzle while he broke out of orbit to intercept
Bronson Star
.”

“You could claim,” said Grimes, “that you acted under duress.”

“Ha! And even if the court believed it, there’d still be the Dunlevin royalists out for revenge.”

“We could go out to the Rim,” contributed Hodge. “Change the ship’s name, our own names. Set up shop as a one-ship tramp company.”

“You’ve been reading too many space stories, Hodge,” said Grimes. “That’s the sort of thing that people do in fiction, never in fact. Known space is festooned with red tape. All—and I mean
all
—data concerning every merchant ship is fed into the memory banks of the Master Registry back on Earth—and those banks are instantly accessible to every port authority on every planet—on every planet that runs to a spaceport, that is. And those that donhaven’t been discovered or settled yet.”

“Surely we could
buy
false ship’s papers and personal papers,” said Hodge.

“Who from?” asked Grimes. “And, more importantly, what with?”

Susie laughed. “Mortdale brought the royalist war chest aboard at Porlock. Folding money, in good Federation credit bills. The accumulation of contributions from refugees such as my revered parents . . . I haven’t made a proper count yet—but there’s plenty. Even if we can’t—as you say—have the ship’s identity changed we can pay to have ourselves . . . transmogrified? Is that the right word? But you know what I mean.”

“But where?” said Grimes, more to himself than to the others. “But where? It can’t be too far away; I want to get
Bronson Star
back to where she came from before there’s too much of a hue and cry. Probably already the Survey Service has been ordered to keep its eyes skinned for us—and if they find us where we shouldn’t be they’ll be claiming the salvage money.”

“Looking after yourself, Grimes,” commented Hodge rather nastily.

Susie sprang to his defense. “And why shouldn’t he? Nobody else is.”

“
I
looked after him,” grumbled the engineer. “If it hadn’t been for me he’d never have gotten off Dunlevin.”

“If it hadn’t been for him,” said Susie, “we’d never have gotten off Dunlevin. We’d be undergoing interrogation by the Secret Police right now.”

“We’re all in this,” said Grimes. “But our ways have to part.” He looked at Susie regretfully, and she at him in the same way. “I must get you to some world where you can use your ill-gotten gains to buy yourselves new lives. Then I must get myself back to Bronsonia to look after my own affairs.”

“Without an engineer?” asked Hodge.

“I’ve covered quite a few light years in
Little Sister
without one. Of course, her engines are designed so as to require minimal maintenance. But the ones in this ship should hold out for the voyage from . . . From? From wherever it is to Bronsonia. And if they don’t . . . I’ll just have to yell for help on the Carlotti—if that hasn’t broken down, too.”

“You could just drop us off somewhere in one of the boats,” said Susie but looked relieved when Grimes refused to consider this expedient.

“We’ll sleep on it,” he said at last after several minutes more of fruitless discussion. He raised no objection when Susie accompanied him to the captain’s quarters which, with the feeling that he was once more putting himself in his rightful place, he had reclaimed.

Chapter 18

GRIMES GOT TO SLEEP
at last. (Susie had been demanding.)