Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (7 page)

He made a slight adjustment of trajectory so that he was now aiming for a lighted port ahead of the airlock door. The Shaara ship was big now, very big, an artificial planetoid hanging in the void.

Now!

He released the pressure on his own firing button and, simultaneously, pressed the one on Tamara’s suit. He was expecting the sudden pressure of deceleration; she was not. He heard the air
whoosh
explosively from her lungs.

And they were in the green-lit chamber, still moving fast but not dangerously so. By the time they made contact with the inner door they had slowed almost to a halt.

They thudded against the metal surface. He cut the drive of Tamara’s suit. They dropped the few centimeters to the deck.

He said, “You can let go now.”

She let go.

He watched the outer door shut. On a dial on the bulkhead a little yellow light began to move slowly clockwise. It stopped, changed to red. The chamber was repressurized.

The inner door opened. Beyond it a princess was standing in a dimly, ruddily illuminated alleyway, towering above a half dozen drones. These latter swarmed over Grimes and the woman, hustling them out of the airlock. Two shrouded figures brushed past them, looking and moving like competitors in a sack race with large bags over their heads as well as covering the lower parts of their bodies. The door closed after them.

Workers,
thought Grimes.
Two technicians to make up the prize crew . . .

The princess lifted the claws at the ends of her two forearms up to her head, made a twisting motion. Grimes understood the gesture, unsealed his helmet.

The Shaara officer said, “You will follow me to the queen.”

***

The air inside the Shaara ship was warm, too warm, and laden with smells that were not quite unpleasant. There was a cloying sweetness intermixed with frequent hints of acidity. There was the acridity of hot machinery and the subdued hammering of the inertial drive, the thin, high whine of the Mannschenn Drive that the Shaara manufactured under license for use in their vessels, having found it more reliable than their own dimension warping device—which Grimes had heard described by a Terran engineer as ‘a pigknot of pendulums’. In a human ship the sounds of voices, laughter, music would have drifted through the alleyway, the combination of tunnel and spiral staircase. Here there was only a subdued humming, vaguely ominous. Luckily there were no obstructions underfoot; the lighting was too dim for human eyes.

Up they climbed, up, up, and round and round, the princess in the lead, the armed drones surrounding Grimes and Tamara. Up, up . . . And then they came into a huge, hemispherical chamber, more a conservatory than the captain’s quarters aboard a spaceship. Moss covered was the deck and every pillar was entwined with broad-leaved vines, the darkness of the foliage relieved by huge, fleshy flowers. Grimes wondered briefly what it would have looked like in normal (to him) lighting; as it was the leaves were almost black and the blossoms glowed a sickly pink.

In the middle of this compartment was the queen-captain. Flabby, obese, she reclined in a sort of hammock slung between four pillars, sprawling among huge cushions. Two princesses stood by her, and a quartet of workers, as tall as their officers but with much broader bodies, fanned her with their wings.

“Captain Grimes,” said the queen.

Grimes wondered whether or not to salute, decided to do so. Perhaps the capture of his passenger and himself was not piracy but only the result of some sort of misunderstanding.

Perhaps.

Nonetheless, he brought his hand up to his helmet.

“Captain Grimes; Superintending Postmistress Haverstock. You understand, Captain, and Superintending Postmistress, that your lives are forfeit. Always it has been the way with our people, long before we flew into Space, that any organism so hapless as to be in the path of our swarms has died.”

“Royal Highness,” said Grimes stiffly, “we were not in the path of your swarm. Your ship would never have passed close to mine if you had not made a deliberate alteration of trajectory.”

“I should not have made an alteration of trajectory if you had not attracted attention to yourself,” said the flat, mechanical voice.

“Even so,” said Grimes, “I demand that Madam Haverstock and I be returned to our ship and allowed to proceed on our voyage.”

“You demand, Captain? Only those with sting may demand.”

“The Survey Service has sting.”

“From what I have heard, Captain Grimes, I do not think that the Survey Service, even if it knew of your predicament, would lift a claw to save you. But you will not be killed at once. I may find uses for you and your companion. Go.”

Telepathic orders were given and the swarming drones hustled the two humans from the Presence.

Chapter 12

THEY WERE HERDED
through a maze of dimly lit tunnels, down ramps that were too steep for human comfort, towards, Grimes thought, the stern of the great ship. Suddenly the princess, who was leading the party, stopped. Four workers appeared as though from nowhere and speedily divested the humans of their spacesuits. To have resisted would have been futile. No attempt was made to strip them of their longjohns, not that it much mattered. The Shaara, although addicted to jewelry, did not wear clothing and the nudity or otherwise of their prisoners meant nothing to them.

A circular doorway expanded in what had been a featureless bulkhead. Grimes and Tamara were pushed through it. The door closed. They were standing in a cubical cell, the deck of which was softly resilient underfoot. Dim red lighting came from a concealed source, barely bright enough for them to be able to make out the details of their prison. On one padded bulkhead two spigots protruded over a narrow drip tray. Against the bulkhead at right angles to it, just above deck level, was a trough through which ran a steady stream of water.

Grimes remembered one of the courses that he had taken while still an officer in the Survey Service, a series of lectures regarding the general lay-outs of the vessels owned and operated by the spacefaring races of the Galaxy, the Shaara among them. This cell was no more—and no less—than an officer’s cabin. One spigot was for
water, the other for food. The trough was for general sanitary use. He realized that he felt thirsty. He went to the taps, pressed the button of one of them, looked at the blob of pink paste that was extruded on to the drip tray. He stuck his forefinger into it, raised a sample to his mouth. The stuff was bland, slightly sweet, almost flavorless. No doubt it was as nutritious as all hell but would be a dreadfully boring diet from the very start. Small wonder that the Shaara so easily became addicted to highly flavored Terran liquor! The other spigot yielded water—flat, lukewarm, unrefreshing.

Tamara joined him at the nutriment dispenser. She said, “At least, we shan’t starve . . .” She did not sound overly enthusiastic. “But where do we . . . ?”

“There,” said Grimes, pointing to the trough.

Even in the dim lighting he could see her angry flush. “This is insufferable! Surely they realize that we must have privacy!”

“Privacy,” he told her, “is a concept meaningless to a social insect.”

“But not to me,” she said. “You’re a spaceman, a captain. Tell these people that we demand to be housed in conditions such as we are accustomed to.”

He said, “I’ve no doubt that this cell is bugged. But bear in mind that our accommodation is, by Shaara standards, first class.”

“Not by mine,” she said stubbornly. “And now, would you mind standing in the corner with your face to the wall? I have to . . .”

After an interval, during which he tried not to listen, she said, “All right. You may turn round now.”

***

Their accommodation was first class by Shaara standards, but they were not Shaara. The food was nourishing, although very soon they were having to force it down, eating only to keep up their strength. They exercised as well as they were able in the cramped quarters when they realized that they were putting on weight. Before long they decided to go naked; the air was hot rather than merely warm, and humid, and their longjohns were becoming uncomfortably sweaty. After a struggle they managed to tear the upper portion of Grimes’ garment into strips for use as washcloths. An estimated twelve days after their capture Grimes sacrificed the lower legs of his longjohns so that Tamara could use the material for sanitary napkins.

Now and again, although not very often, there was a flare-up of sexuality, a brief and savage coming together that left them both exhausted but strangely unsatisfied. Always at the back of their minds was the suspicion, the knowledge almost, that alien eyes were watching. Also, Grimes missed, badly, his pipe as a sort of dessert after intercourse. (He missed his pipe. Period.) And Tamara complained every time about the roughness of his face; there were no facilities in the cell for depilation. (He noted, with a brief flicker of interest, that her body remained hairless.)

Fortunately for their sanity both of them could talk—and listen. The trouble there was that Tamara, when Grimes was telling stories about his past life, would interrupt and say, “But you handled that wrongly. You should have . . .”

And after the first few times he would snap, “I was there, and you weren’t!” and then there would be a sulky silence.

It was squalid, humiliating—but the ultimate humiliation was yet to come.

Without warning the door of their cell opened and a swarm of drones burst in and chivvied them out into the alleyway, along tunnels and up ramps until they came to a huge chamber that must have occupied almost an entire deck of the Shaara ship.

Chapter 13

IT WAS, GRIMES SUPPOSED,
a recreation room—although it would have passed muster as an indoor jungle. There was the moss-covered deck, pillars so thickly covered with flowering vines that they could have been trees, real trees the uppermost branches of which brushed the deck-head and, in the center of the compartment, was a seemingly haphazard piling of smooth rocks down which glistening water tinklingly trickled. And there was
Baroom’s
crew—a scattering of bejewelled princesses, a rather larger number of gaudily caparisoned drones, a horde of comparatively drab workers.

The two humans were dragged to the pile of rocks, up it to a platform on the top of it. The drones returned to deck level leaving a princess there with them. Suddenly a bright spotlight came on, playing over their naked bodies. The princess extended one of her upper arms. The taloned “hand” at its extremity touched, first, Tamara’s left breast, then her right, then descended to her groin. It hovered there briefly, then moved to Grimes’ penis. Instinctively he tried to swat the claw away but, with lightning rapidity, another claw caught his arm, scratching it painfully.

“Do not struggle,” said the princess. “You will not be harmed. We are instructing our crew. And now you and the female will perform for us your generative functions.”

“Not a hope in hell!” snarled Grimes.

“I do not understand. Please to repeat.”

“No,” said Grimes definitely.

“You mean that you will not perform for us?”

“Yes.”

“It does not matter,” said the princess. “We have obtained certain records from your ship. Perhaps you will find it amusing to watch. We shall find them instructive.”

Records?
wondered Grimes—and then he remembered.

Not only his prominent ears were burning with embarrassment—the angry flush spread over his entire body.

To one side of the circular chamber the wall was clear of vegetation. It glowed suddenly with light—not the red illumination that was the norm for this ship but bright, white, with splashes of color. The scene was the cabin of
Little Sister.
There was a cast of two, Grimes and Tamara Haverstock. There was hardly any dialogue but there were gasps and little screams. There was an intertwining of naked limbs, an undignified, vigorous pumping . . .

“You bastard!” whispered the woman—the actual woman, not the one on the screen—viciously. “You
bastard!”

“I can explain . . .” muttered Grimes.

“There are questions,” said the princess. “Not many of our crew are familiar with humans and their ways. There are those who ask how many eggs the female will produce after the mating.”

“You
bastard.’”
repeated Tamara Haverstock.

Chapter 14

FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE
Grimes tried to forget the details of the remainder of the voyage. Thinking of it as a preview of hell might have been an exaggeration, but it was most certainly not a foretaste of heaven, and in purgatory (we are told) there is hope. Hope was a quality altogether absent from this cramped cell with its boredom, its savorless food, the hateful company of the hating woman who spoke only to snarl at him, who had lost all interest in her appearance and who had become a compulsive eater, whose once trim body had become a mass of unsightly bulges, whose breasts were sagging, whose hair fell in an unsightly tangle about her sweaty, fattening, sullen face. Even so small a comfort
(small
comfort?) as his precious pipe with a supply of tobacco would have made conditions slightly less intolerable, but he was denied even this.

But every voyage must have its end.

And then, at long last, came the time when Grimes woke from an uneasy sleep. The light in the cabin was changing, shifting, deepening from pink to violet and its perspective was no longer that of a cube but a tesseract. Tamara’s sprawled, naked figure was as he had first known it, long-legged, firm-bodied, with the fine bone structure of her face prominent. She was snoring, but even that normally unlovely sound was musical . . .

Abruptly perspective, light and color were again as they always (for how long? for too long) had been. But sound was different. There was something lacking—and that something was the all-pervasive thin, high whine of the Mannschenn Drive. So, thought Grimes,
Baroom
was making planetfall. So in a matter of a few hours, or even less, it would be landing stations.

He touched the woman on a fleshy shoulder. Her eyes slowly opened. She looked up at him with an expression that at first was oddly eager but that almost immediately became one of extreme distaste.