Ride the Star Winds (3 page)

“There’s a case waiting for you at the airport with plenty of light reading for your voyage—spools and spools of it. The VIP suite, of course, has a playmaster. You’ll get a good idea of the world you’re going to—history from the first settlement to the present. And now, finish your drink. The car’s waiting to take us out to Kennedy. Don’t forget the commission—there’s a case for it somewhere. Ah, here . . .”

They emerged from the Protector’s office into the corridor. Bendeen’s manner changed, became stiff, hostile even. He said, as they passed through the door, “. . . this appointment was none of my choosing. But you are now the Governor—until such time as you are relieved.”

Which will not be soon enough,
implied the Protector’s expression.

Grimes took the hint. This corridor must be well-covered by audio-visual bugs. He kept his distance from the Protector, set his face into sullen lines. The two men maintained their charade until they shook hands, with a marked lack of enthusiasm, at the airport and Grimes boarded the ramjet for Woomera.

Chapter 5

The master
of the Trans-Galactic
Clipper
Sobraon
was well-accustomed to the carriage of Very Important Passengers and to playing the urbane and courteous host. VIPs who were also ex-pirates were, however, outside his normal experience. He had heard of Grimes—who among the spacefaring community had not?—and had never been among his admirers. Even as a small boy he had not considered pirates and privateers glamorous; as a shipmaster he regarded them as vicious and dangerous criminals. When he had been shown his passenger list for the forthcoming voyage, with the names of those worthy of special attention marked with a star, he had stared at it incredulously.

“Not
the
Grimes?” he had demanded of his purser.

“I’m afraid so, sir,” she had replied.

“But . . . A
governor . . .
Can’t you be mistaken, Liz? Surely there must be more than one John Grimes in this universe.”

“Not with jug-handle ears. His photograph was among all the others in the Security parcel.”

“But he was on trial for piracy.”

“A Court of Inquiry, sir, not a trial.”

“Even so, he had his Certificate dealt with. The judge and the assessors must have thought that he was guilty of something. And with good reason. And am I supposed to have him at my table?”

“With all the other VIPs.” She grinned. “At least he’ll be less boring than the others.”

He scowled at her. “The man’s a pirate, with blood on his hands. Get this straight, Liz, I don’t want you and your tabbies fawning on him as though he were the latest tridi heart-throb. All that concerns us is that we’re to deliver him from Port Woomera to Port Libertad with celerity and enjoying a far greater standard of luxury than he deserves. If I had
my
way I’d put him in one of the J Deck dogboxes!”

“You still could, sir. You’re the master.”

“Ha! And how long should I stay in one of the Line’s senior ships if I did that? He must be treated correctly. Liz—with
icy
correctness. Convey subtly that any respect accorded to him is to his rank, not to himself. But subtly, Liz, subtly. Perfect service—but without the personal touch. The liquid hydrogen hand in the velvet glove . . .”

“Is velvet a good insulator, sir?”

“How the hell should I know? That will do, Liz; you’ve plenty to look after.”

When the girl was gone he rang for his chief officer and then issued to that gentleman instructions as to how the VIP was to be treated.

Sobraon
lifted from Port Woomera, slowly at first and then with increasing velocity as the thrust of her inertial drive built up. Grimes was a guest in the liner’s control room, such courtesy often being extended to senior astronauts traveling as passengers and to civilian VIPs. He strongly suspected that the invitation had been extended to him in the second capacity. He looked out through the viewports at the fast receding scenery—to one side the semi-desert with its green rectangles of irrigated land, crisscrossed with silvery canals, to the other the dark sea with, far to the southward, the white glimmer of the Antarctic ice barrier. Twice recently he had been on Earth, he thought, and on neither occasion had he paid a visit to the Space Academy in Antarctica. The first time he might have done so, as a graduate who, despite the circumstances of his resignation from the Survey Service, was now a successful shipowner. On the second occasion it might not have been politic. A privateer-turned-pirate would hardly have been regarded by the Commandant as an Old Boy whose career should be emulated by the cadets.

He heard one of the officers whispering to another, “I wonder what he’s thinking about? Is he working out how he could skyjack the ship?”

He looked around to see who it was. It must have been Kelner, the liner’s chief officer, who flushed and turned away hastily as Grimes’s eye caught his. The ponderously portly Captain Harringby must, too, have heard that whisper—but the expression on his heavy face was approving rather than otherwise. Then the shipmaster looked at Grimes who, although no telepath, could tell what he was thinking.
I
invited you up here only because Company Regulations require that I give you the VIP treatment. But I don’t have to like you.

Grimes shrugged. So he was
persona non grata.
So what? It was not for the first time in his life, almost certainly would not be for the last. He would stick it out, seated stolidly in the spare chair. He would, after trajectory had been set, graciously accept the invitation, no matter how grudgingly offered, to partake of the ritual drink with the captain and his senior officers. Throughout the voyage to Liberia he would be the very model of a modern Governor General.
(All right, all right,
he told himself irritably,
I
know that it should be Major General and, in any case, I’m only a Governor.
He looked at Harringby, smugly omnipotent in his command chair, and thought,
And I’d sooner be a shipmaster again.)

Trajectory was set (competently enough, Grimes admitted) and
Sobraon
was falling down the warped continuum on the first leg of her passage, Earth to Liberia. (This was, actually, no more than a deviation; Trans-Galactic Clippers specialized in carrying rich passengers around the truly glamorous worlds of the Galaxy—to Caribbea, with its warm seas and lush, tropical islands, to Atlantia for the big game fishing and the ocean yacht races, to Morrowvia, with its exotic cat people, to New Venusberg, with its entertainments to suit all warped tastes, to Waverley, with its reconstruction of a Scottish culture that owed more to myth than to actual history, to Electra, where those of a scientific bent could feast their eyes on the latest marvels.)

Trajectory was set, the powerful gyroscopes pulling the ship around her axes until the target star was ahead, then making the necessary adjustment for galactic drift. (Grimes flexed his idle hands on the arm rests of his chair, for so long he had been doing what Captain Harringby was doing now, it seemed—it was!—all wrong that he was no longer doing it.) The Mannschenn Drive was actuated. Deep in the bowels of the great ship the rotors began to turn, to spin, to precess, to tumble down and through the warped dimensions as the temporal precession field built up.

There was the usual brief disorientation, the transient nausea and, for Grimes at least, a flash of prevision.

He saw, as plainly as if she had been standing there in person, one of his fellow privateers, Captain Agatha Prinn of the star tramp
Agatha’s Ark.
She was dressed—how else?—in her uniform of severely cut, short-skirted business suit, gray, with minimal trimmings of gold braid. She was holding a paper bag. She dropped it. It burst when it hit the ground, releasing a cloud of fine, white powder. . . .

Colors, perspective and sounds snapped back to normal.

Grimes blinked, found that he was staring out of a viewport to an interstellar night in which the stars were no longer bright points of unwinking light but were amorphous nebulae.

Agatha Prinn and a flour bomb!
he wondered.
What the hell was all
that
about?

He realized that Captain Harringby was addressing him.

“Your Excellency,” (but that’s
me
!
thought Grimes) “we are now on trajectory. Would you care to join me for liquid refreshment before lunch?”

It
would make the old bastard’s day if I said no,
Grimes told himself.

“Thank you, Captain,” he said as he unbuckled himself from his seat.

Chapter 6

It was a peculiar voyage,
not altogether unpleasant, with its mixture of ostracism and adulation and downright pampering. Governor Grimes took his meals at the captain’s table—and Captain Harringby, presiding over this lavish board, accorded the governor the respect due to him while making it plain that he did not approve of Commodore Grimes, the pirate chief. Now and again he permitted himself a flash of unkind humor, such as when the wine stewardess was dispensing a vintage Burgundy to accompany the roast beef. “I suppose, Your Excellency, that you must, now and again, have acquired some very fine wines among your other . . . er . . . loot?”

“The Hallichecki,” Grimes had replied stiffly, “do not use alcohol.” He added, after sipping from his glass, “My privateering operations were against the shipping of the Hegemony.”

“But didn’t you seize a Terran ship? One of the Commission’s liners?”

“That happened after a mutiny, Captain. It all came out at the Court of Inquiry.” He added, “And, in any case, the attempted piracy was unsuccessful.”

The others at the table were looking at him, some with disapproval and contempt, others with what was almost admiration. There was the fat Joachim Levy, one of the Dog Star Line’s managers taking his Long Service Leave and bound for New Venusberg. He pursed his thick lips, then said,
“Our
ships are used to coping with piracy. When necessary they are armed—and their crews know how to use their weapons.”

“I know,” Grimes told him. “My Mate was ex-Dog Star Line. He was a very good gunnery officer.”

Levy scowled and the plump, artificially blonde Mrs. Levy laughed. “So all the drills that the Dog Star Line officers have to go through are some use after all!” She smiled quite prettily at Grimes. “But wasn’t it
fun,
Your Excellency? Sailing the seas of space with the Jolly Roger at the masthead and a cutlass clenched between your teeth?”

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes.

“In the
good
old days,” said Ivor Sandorsen, who was a Lloyd’s underwriter, “you would have been hanged from your own yardarm, Your Excellency.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Grimes, “one of my ancestors was.”

“Thus establishing a precedent.”

“Another, better-known, pirate,” said Grimes, “established another precedent. Sir Henry Morgan. He became a governor.”

“Had Lloyd’s been in existence in those days, sir, he would have paid the just penalty for his crimes.”

“In any case,” said Harringby with a superior smile, “I think that His Excellency will admit that the governorship of Liberia is hardly a plum as such appointments go. More of a rotten apple, perhaps.”

“Have you been there, Captain?” asked Mrs. Levy, who seemed to have appointed herself Grimes’s champion.

“No, madam. Nor do I want to. I shall place my ship in orbit about that world and a tender will rendezvous to pick up His Excellency. Then I shall be on my way.”

“Rejoicing?” asked Grimes.

“I shall most certainly not be weeping.”

“And you, Your Excellency,” asked Dorothea Taine, tall, dark, intense, author of a best seller which Grimes’s father had scornfully dismissed as
Womens’ Weekly
rubbish, “will you be weeping or rejoicing?”

“That remains to be seen,” Grimes told her.

* * *

“Sir—Your Excellency, I mean—what’s it really like being a pirate? Sorry. A privateer. . . .” The young Fifth Officer made his diffident approach to Grimes as he was just dismounting from one of the exercise bicycles in the liner’s gymnasium.

“There are better and safer ways of earning a living,” Grimes said.

“Safer, perhaps, sir. But . . . Would you know if Commodore Kane is still trying to find volunteers for his privateer fleet?”

“Drongo Kane is better stayed away from. In any case, as you must have heard, the Survey Service is smacking down on all privateering operations.”

“Mr. Barray!” The Chief Officer had just come into the gymnasium for his own exercise session. “Here you are. I thought that you were supposed to be checking the equipment in your lifeboat.”

“I . . . I’ve finished that, sir. It’s all in order.”

“Then find Mr. McGurr and lend him a hand in hydroponics. This is his tank cleaning day.”

Crestfallen, the young man left the gym. Shedding his robe and, clad only in trunks, the Chief Officer mounted the bicycle that Grimes had vacated. As he started to pedal he said, “Even you, Your Excellency, must know that young men often evince enthusiasm for the most unworthy people and causes.”

“Are you implying that I’m unworthy, Mr. Kelner?”

“I never said so, Your Excellency.”

“I can
use
you, Your Excellency. Or may I call you John? After all, I know your father; I’ve met him at Australian Society of Authors meetings . . .”

Grimes looked at Dorothea Taine over his coffee cup. He was taking this midmorning refreshment in the lounge; he did not see why he should be confined to his quarters, luxurious though they were, even though he was something of a social leper.

“Use me?” he asked.

The writer smiled. Her teeth were too large for her small mouth. The heavy-rimmed spectacles that she affected made her big, black eyes look even bigger in her sallow face.

“I want to use you . . . John.”

“How, Ms. Taine?” asked Grimes dubiously.

“Dorothea, please. Or you may call me Dot. I’m starting a new novel. One of those If stories. If Dampier, the buccaneer and privateer, had established a settlement on the West Coast of Australia, long before the one was established at Botany Bay. After all, he was there. . . .”