Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (17 page)

Grimes stood on.

The blimp stood on.

Stubborn bitch . . .
thought Grimes of the Shaara airship’s captain. But she, princess or high-ranking worker, would be expecting the other aircraft to burst into flames at any second and, secure in the knowledge of the non-flammability of her own vessel, would be prepared to skirt closely or even to fly through the flaming wreckage. She was due for a big surprise.

She stood on, her automatic guns still hammering away. Hot metal flattened on the transparency of the pinnace’s forward viewport, fell away. Then her nerve failed. When there was nothing at all visible from
Little Sister’s
control cab but the huge, clumsy, grey bulk of her she pulled sharply to starboard. Grimes held his course, striking her a glancing blow. The blimp rebounded from the contact like a violently struck beach ball. The pinnace, with her far greater mass, stood on stolidly. Grimes hoped that the camouflage had not been torn from the pinnace’s port side exposing her true nature. He brought her round slowly, careful to maintain the impression that she was only a slow and clumsy airship, adjusted trim so that he had the Shaara blimp in sight. She swam into his limited field of vision. Her envelope was crumpled and she was settling slowly but as far as Grimes could see there were no fragments from his disguise adhering to the wreckage. He turned away from the disabled ship and from the squad of drones flying fast towards him, laser pistols drawn and ready. Probably they would succeed in setting fire to the sonic insulation with which
Little Sister
was covered; as long as the bright golden plating was not revealed thereby the resulting smoke and flame would be more to his advantage than otherwise.

He returned his attention to the radar screen.

Something big was ahead, was rising rapidly. It could only be
Baroom.
It could only be the Rogue Queen determined to make an example of the native dirigible that had dared to ram one of her airships.

And what weaponry would she be using?

Laser, probably, thought Grimes—but he was not surprised when he felt the muffled shock of close explosions and heard the faint clangs of shrapnel that had penetrated the disguising envelope and the vegetable fibre lagging. And these must be well ablaze by now although the smoke and flame, blowing astern, were not visible from the control cab. Nonetheless the temperature gauges showed that the outer skin was heating rapidly although the interior of the pinnace was still cool.

The Rogue Queen still had time to launch a nuclear missile, but time was running out for her. If she delayed firing such a weapon much longer she could not use it for fear of destroying her own ship. But, thought Grimes, she might take that risk. So he increased speed, hoping to be able to carry out his intentions before the last of the blazing camouflage was stripped away.

Baroom
was in sight visually now. Grimes stared at her through the ragged, widening rent in the tattered fabric of the envelope. He saw the continuous flashes from her turret guns, the scintillating streams of tracer shells. The Shaara gunnery was not at all brilliant; whoever was in fire control was still assuming that the moving target was making only the normal speed of an airship. The Shaara, he remembered, did not use computers to any great extent; an organization of intelligent, social insects is, to a
certain degree, an organic computer itself with built-in limitations, including a refusal to admit data known to be impossible, and until
Little Sister
was stripped of the last of her disguise her speed would fall into that category.

Baroom
was close now. Grimes could see the people in the transparent dome of her control room—Shaara and a scattering of humanoids. He aimed for the rounded apex of the huge, conical spaceship and pressed the firing switches of the twin lasers. Reflected light almost blinded him, but it must have been worse, much worse, for the Rogue Queen, her officers and her allies before the automatic screening was actuated. In that instant they would have realized who their enemy was, but now it was too late for them to do anything about it.

Little Sister
bored in viciously—but in almost the last instant before impact Grimes applied full stern power. Tough though his ship was he did not wish to subject her to the strain of a collision and, even if she survived the shock relatively unscathed, it was unlikely that her crew would do so.

But she struck, hard enough for her prow to make a deep dent in the shell of the Shaara control room. She struck, and as she did so Grimes cut the reverse thrust and came ahead again on his inertial drive, gently at first and then building up to the full capacity of his engines.

Something gave, but it was not the fantastically strong structure of the pinnace. Grimes fired his lasers through the widening crack in the Shaara warship’s stem. Only those directly in the line of fire would be killed but the others would be panicking—he hoped—and instruments and controls would be destroyed. He . . . pushed.

Baroom
fell away from the vertical, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

Suddenly she toppled and had Grimes not applied full stern power
Little Sister
would have been dragged down with her. She plunged to the ground, driven to destruction by her own mighty engines rather than dragged by the force of gravity.

She struck, and it was only then that Grimes realized that the battle had taken place over the city of Kahtrahn. He watched in horror as tall buildings crumpled under the impact, as other buildings were rocked by the explosion of
Baroom’s
ammunition, as fires broke out among the ruins.

He turned to the others, said in a shaky voice, “We must go down. We must help . . .”

Lennay said, “What can we do, Captain? We have done enough . . .”

“You can say that again,” Grimes told him. “But we must render assistance.”

“Those people,” said Tamara, “must be hating all aliens, including us, by now. It’s time that we were getting out of here.”

Reluctantly Grimes conceded that she was right.

Chapter 30

THE PROPHECY FULFILLED
the demons from Outer Space destroyed, Delur and Samz ascended to Heaven. They left, as saviours so often do, quite a mess behind them. The Desabans were not as grateful as they might have been and were inclined to harp upon the fact that their capital city had been devastated and to cast doubts upon the divinity of Grimes and Tamara. And in Taraplan, now that there was no longer any danger of Shaara domination, only a handful of fanatics preached the Old Religion. The trouble was that the Darijjans had become accustomed, over the years, to visits from outside and knew that they themselves could build spaceships once they got around to it. Meanwhile there was a period of anarchy until a successor to the late President Callaray could be found. There was a paying off
of old scores. There were rioting and arson.

Grimes—who had always evinced a weakness for taking sides—would have liked to stay to help Lennay and his adherents. Tamara, however, insisted that the voyage be resumed at once, that the precious consignment of parcel mail be carried to its recipient without further delay. She talked menacingly about the penalties for breach of contract. Grimes could not but listen to her. He insisted, however, that he perform one last service for his devotees—the rounding up of the Shaara survivors. These, not having been aboard
Baroom
at the time of her destruction, had fled to an island off the south coast of Desaba where they had killed or enslaved the native inhabitants. They had three blimps, automatic projectile weapons and lasers. The ammunition for their machine guns was limited but, as each of the airships possessed its own generator, the power cells of the laser pistols could be recharged as required for a long time to come.

There were princesses, drones and workers—females, males and neuters. Possibly breeding had commenced already.

The raid on the island was a short and bloody business.
Little Sister,
no longer in disguise, pounced at first light. Somehow the Shaara were expecting her. The blimps were already airborne and around each of them was a squadron of drones. They made no attempt to flee but attacked at once. A pinnace built of normal materials would have been overwhelmed by the ferocity of the assault. Looking back on it all Grimes was inclined to think that it was deliberately suicidal. The blimps bored in, their machine cannon flaming. The streams of tracers converged on the pinnace and the bursting shells blotted out all vision from the forward viewport. The drones were above
Little Sister,
around her, below her. Skin temperature gauges went mad.

Grimes fired the twin lasers and, at the same time, swung the ship’s head to port, then to starboard, slashing with the double beam. The cannonade abruptly ceased and he could see ahead again, watched all three blimps fluttering groundward, their descent barely slowed by the charred rags that had been their envelopes. The crews—those who were still living—flew out from the cars to join the battling drones. Grimes slashed again and bee bodies burst smokily.

But the drones surrounding
Little Sister
were keeping well out of the field of fire of her lasers. Even if they could not hurt her—although they were searching frantically for a weak spot—they could not be hurt themselves. But they were singleminded, concentrating their fury on the obvious enemy. Perhaps they did see the native dirigible that came drifting above the battle; if they did, they ignored her. She could be dealt with at leisure. They were not expecting the invisible vapor that was discharged from her gondola, that fell slowly, that blinded and poisoned.

Sickened, Grimes watched the last of them, with wings twitching feebly and ineffectually, plunge to join their dead companions on the rocky ground.

Chapter 31

JOHN GRIMES
and Tamara Haverstock came to Boggarty. They were not received on that world as deities. At first they were treated with considerable coldness. The Tiralbin Post Office had contracted to deliver an important consignment of parcel mail by a certain date. The subcontractor had entered into a similar agreement. Neither had met the terms of the contract.

The Planetary High Commissioner was a reasonable man, however. He listened patiently to Grimes’ slightly edited story. He agreed that Grimes was entitled to plead Restraint of Princes and that neither Boggarty nor Tiralbin could successfully sue him for Breach of Contract. He maintained though, to Tamara’s great disgust, that the penalty clauses regarding late delivery applied insofar as she was concerned.

She said to Grimes when they were alone together,
“You
look after yourself, don’t you?”

“Somebody has to,” he told her smugly.

She said, “The way things are I may as well get my full money’s worth out of your precious contract. I can demand that you provide me with an escort until the mail is delivered.”

“All right,” he said.

The High Commissioner had provided them with a ground car and a driver, a stolid colonist who sat dourly in his seat and made no move to assist with the offloading from
Little Sister.
The sack of parcels was both heavy and awkward but Grimes dragged it out of the locker, to the airlock, and then struggled to lift it into the rear of the vehicle while Tamara muttered, “Careful, Grimes, careful . . . If anything is damaged you will be held responsible.”

They drove from the spaceport to the city, were taken to the lofty cylindrical tower that was the seat of planetary government. Again Grimes was obliged to go into his porterage act, carrying the sack from the car to the elevator, from the elevator to the High Commissioner’s office.

“Sir,” said Tamara to the portly men sitting behind the huge, gleaming desk, “please accept delivery of the mail. I have to report that the bag was tampered with by the Shaara and that one carton was opened and one can taken.”

“Captain Grimes has already informed me, Miss Haverstock,” said the Commissioner. “He mentioned that, among other things, during our telephone conversation.”

“Sign here, please,” said Tamara, producing a pad of receipt forms. “I have already made the necessary endorsement.”

“I am not the actual consignee, Madam. But Grigadil will make his mark. He should be here at any moment.”

“Grigadil?” asked Grimes curiously.

“Yes, Captain. The King Boggart. He instructed his people not to make any more wire sculptures for export until I did something to help him with his peculiarly personal problem. Ah, here he is now . . .”

A boggart shambled into the office.

The films that Grimes had viewed concerning Boggarty had not prepared him for the full repulsiveness of the indigenes. In addition to their horrendous appearance they—or, at least, this one did—stank, a rank, animal effluvium.

The being extended a clawed hand, pointed to the mail sack.

“Mine?”

‘“Yes, Grigadil,” said the High Commissioner. “And now if you will sign the lady’s paper . . .”

“No sign till know if work. All wives give me no peace for too long. Me afraid they find younger husband—but me not old . . .”

You look,
thought Grimes,
like some prehuman from the dawn of time who’s been aging steadily ever since . . .

Grigadil tore open the sack, pulled out a wrapped carton. His claws made short work of the outer coverings. He extracted a can. Grimes could read the gaudy label: VENUS STRAWBERRIES. Grigadil pulled the tab, lifted the now topless container to his wide, tusked mouth, swallowed noisily.

Tamara was looking down with an expression of horrified fascination on her face. Grimes wondered what was causing this and then he saw. The boggart was wearing only a filthy rag as a kilt and it was now no longer adequate to hide what was under it.

“Good,” grunted Grigadil. “Good. Me sign. Me go back to cave and show wives who boss.”

Wordlessly Tamara handed the creature the pad and the stylus, keeping as much distance as possible between him and herself. She glared at Grimes when he said cheerfully, “As we’ve already found out, it’s love that makes the world go round!”