Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (91 page)

“She spoke the truth, sir,” said Mayhew. “And Lord Delamere’s translation was a faithful one. The trade route between Kookadahl and New Maine seems the most promising. Much of the freight is carried in the ships of the Hegemony. From Kookadahl to New Maine there are tree pearls, mainly for transshipment to other human worlds. Quite precious, as you know. Attempts have been made to grow the pearl tree, from smuggled seeds, on other planets but they have never been successful.”

“Spare me the botany lesson, Mr. Mayhew.”

“Sorry, sir. Tree pearls, and
ferancha
skins and ingots of gold and platinum . . . The other way the pickings wouldn’t be so good. A horrid sort of fish meal that they make on New Maine for the Hallicheki market. Things like eels, pickled in brine. Too—and this is what suits
our
purpose—one of the Terran ships, the Commission’s
Epsilon Draconis
, selected to be a possible victim of piracy, is on that trade. Her assistant purser is really, like myself, a PCO from the Survey Service.”

“But will the Hallicheki institute a convoy system?” wondered Grimes aloud. “Will they arm their merchantmen?”

“I don’t think so,” Mayhew told him. “Or, at least, not at first. Even if there are spies for the Hegemony among the crews of the ITC tramps—which is extremely unlikely—it will take some time to organize convoys, to fit defensive armament and all the rest of it. The Hallicheki Admiralty will be at least as slow as ours when it comes to dedigitating.”

“You could be right,” conceded Grimes. “You probably are right.”

He dismissed Mayhew and sent for Magda Granadu.

***

She brought the coins and the book.

Grimes shook the ancient discs of silvery alloy in his cupped hands, feeling—as he had before—that he was standing at the focus of supernatural lines of force.
It’s no more than superstition,
he told himself.
But . . .

The coins clinked between the concavities of his palms. He let them drop to the deck.

Two tails and and head . . . Yin . . .

Two heads and a tail . . . Yang . . .

Three tails . . . Yin . . .

Three heads . . . Yang . . .

Two tails and a head . . . Yin . . .

Three tails . . . Yin . . .

The trigrams: Chen, thunder, arousing, K’an, water, dangerous . . .

The hexagram: Hsieh, Escape . . .

“It all looks rather ominous,” said Grimes to the woman.

“It is,” she murmured as she consulted the book.

Escape. Advantage will be found to the south and west. If no further expeditions are called for, good fortune will come from returning home . . .

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” he said. “But the south and west? Austral and Port Woomera?”

“There’s more,” she told him. “There’s the commentary, and the lines . . .”

Here the trigram depicting danger is confronted by that depicting powerful arousal. By movement there is an escape from peril . . .

“A blinding glimpse of the obvious,” he said.

The lines . . .

Sixth in the third place. He travels in a carriage, with a porter to handle his baggage. Such behavior will tempt robbers to attack him. However firm and correct he may try to be, there will be cause for regret . . .

“But
I’m
supposed to be the robber,” he said.

Nine in the fourth place. Remove your toes. Friends in whom you can trust will then approach.

“Remove my
toes
, Magda?”

“The interpretation, Commodore,” she told him, “is that you remove hangers-on from your immediate circle, thus allowing true friends to approach.”

“Hangers-on?”

“I could name a few. Her Highness Wally, for one. And for all the use the Green Hornet is, she’s another. And . . .”

“That’ll do.”

Six in the sixth place. The prince looses an arrow from his bow and hits a falcon sitting on top of a high wall. The effect of this action will be in every way advantageous . . .

“A falcon,” said Grimes. “So I shall be taking some Hallicheki ships.”

“You should not take it literally, Commodore. According to the interpretation—he removes the most powerful of his enemies and escapes from their domination.”

“It could be worse,” he said. “Much worse.”

“But there’s still danger,” she told him.

Chapter 46

THROUGH THE WARPED CONTINUUM
fell the four ships, their temporal precession rates unsynchronized, using their mass proximity indicators to maintain a rather ragged line astern formation.

Grimes ordered frequent drills. He had been able to stock up on missiles and ammunition for the quick-firing cannon on Kalla. (He had, too, been appalled at the price charged for these martial necessities by the Kallans.) He decided to let Captain O’Leary make the first capture. The sooner that
Pride of Erin
was on her way to El Dorado with her prize and out of the commodore’s hair the better. Captain MacWhirter would be the next to go.
Spaceways Princess
came in the barely competent category.
Agatha’s Ark
he would keep with him as long as possible. Then, when
Sister Sue
was a ship alone, it would be time to instigate the incident that would give the Survey Service the excuse to crack down on the privateers. He would be rather sorry, he admitted to himself, when the time came. He was enjoying being a commodore, with a small fleet under his command. He was looking forward to deploying his squadron, even though it would be against only unarmed merchantmen.

The ships maintained a Carlotti listening watch but broke radio silence rarely, and then transmitted only on very low power. Aboard the flagship was a plotting tank and in it Grimes was able to record the positions of merchant shipping traversing a sphere light-years in diameter. It was a fascinating exercise, requiring considerable navigational skill. Vessels outbound from New Maine to Kookadahl would not be worth bothering with. What value would a cargo of stinking fish paste be? But, at last, there was a ship, one of the Hegemony’s freighters, bound from Kookadahl to the Terran colony.

The squadron steered an intercepting trajectory.

Presumably the Hallicheki captain would have a mass proximity indicator in her control room. Possibly she would become perturbed to see an obvious formation heading toward her. She might assume that it was a squadron of Kallan warships, commerce raiders, and squawk for help.

In
Sister Sue’s
Main Carlotti Room old Mr. Stewart was standing by, watching his rotating Mobius Strip antennae, his dials and oscilloscopes. He had his orders. As soon as
Krorkor
—that was the name of the Hallicheki ship, learned from her transmissions in English to the Carlotti station at New Maine—began to send, a characteristic squiggle would appear in one of the screens. Immediately Stewart’s especially designed computer would match crests with troughs, troughs with crests. In the oscilloscope the wavy line of green luminosity would be replaced by one almost straight. From the speakers of any transceivers tuned to the Hallicheki ship would issue . . . nothing.

Grimes, now, rarely strayed from the control room, taking catnaps in his command chair, nibbling snacks and drinking coffee brought up to him by Magda, fouling the atmosphere with the acrid fumes from his vile pipe. He was reasonably happy when Williams or Venner had the watch, distinctly uneasy when Ms. Connellan was in charge. As fourth officer the Countess of Walshingham should have been sharing the chief officer’s watchkeeping duties but Grimes had told his mate, “Find some sort of job for that snooty bitch, Billy, that doesn’t bring her anywhere near Control!”

Mr. Stewart was undergoing a far less wearing time than his captain. The responsibility for jamming the victim’s transmissions, should she attempt to make any, was divided between
Sister Sue
,
Spaceways Princess
and
Agatha’s Ark.
Captain O’Leary had been ordered to instruct his radio officer to monitor all Carlotti signals originating from anywhere at all.
Pride of Erin
was the squadron clown, one of those ships incapable of doing anything right, inevitably slow off the mark. It would be good to be rid of her.

Slowly, steadily, the range closed, could be measured in light-minutes and, at last, in kilometers. The Hallicheki captain finally squawked—or tried to squawk. Stewart, who had the Carlotti watch, jammed her before she could do more than clear her scrawny throat prior to speaking. Grimes, no longer in his chair, stood over the main MPI screen, staring into the sphere of velvety blackness in which were the four bright sparks—the potential victim, the other three privateers and, in the exact center,
Sister Sue’s
reference marker. He saw that relative bearings were no longer changing as they had been. He realized what had happened, was happening. The Hallicheki had shut down her drives—Mannschenn and inertial—as the preliminary to a major alteration of trajectory. This, inevitably, was a time-consuming process. And when the gyroscopes had swung the ship, turning her hull about its axes, which way would she be heading? Grimes guessed—and, as it turned out, correctly—that the panic-stricken hen would put the raiders right astern and then increase not only the thrust of the inertial drive but the intensity of the temporal precession field.

“Stop Mannschenn!” he ordered Williams, who was in the 2 I/C seat. “Stop inertial drive. Pass the order to all ships. Make it Action Stations!”

“I’ve only one pair of hands, Skipper,” the mate grumbled—but it was a good-humored whinge. The subdued clangor of the inertial drive slowed and ceased while Grimes was still making his way back to his own chair. He managed to pull himself into the seat despite the cessation of acceleration and the consequent free fall. The thin, high note of the Mannschenn drive deepened to a hum, then died away. As the temporal precession field faded the stridulation of the alarms shrilled to near inaudibility. Colors sagged down the spectrum and perspective was a meaningless concept.

And there was that song again.

I murdered William Moore as I sailed, as I sailed . . .

Then everything snapped back to normal—colors, sounds, perspective. Grimes stared into the two miniature repeater screens before him—mass proximity indicator and radar. The Hallicheki ship was a radar target now, just inside the extreme range of two thousand kilometers. So she had not yet restarted her interstellar drive, was still in normal spacetime. Obedient to the touch of the captain’s fingers the powerful directional gyroscopes deep in
Sister Sue’s
bowels rumbled and Grimes felt himself pressed into the padding—under his buttocks, along his spine and his right side—of his chair by centrifugal forces. He brought the tiny spark that was the merchantman directly ahead, held it there and then reactivated the inertial drive, on maximum thrust.

“General chase!” he ordered and heard Venner repeat the words, heard acknowledgments from the other ships. He hoped that all that he had ever heard about Hallicheki spacemanship—not held in very high regard by the Survey Service’s officer instructors—was true. By the time that the fumbling hens had gotten their vessel onto the new trajectory, with inertial and interstellar drives restarted, the privateers would be almost within range. (Of course, if the avian captain had any sense she would steer toward the pursuit, not away from it. Grimes remembered a ride that he had taken in a ground car, years ago, through the Australian countryside, and a witless hen that had run ahead of the vehicle, swerving neither to left nor right. He
knew
, somehow, that his quarry would be equally witless.)

He glanced up and out through the viewports. The stars were hard, bright—and there were those other, unnatural constellations, the recognition lights of the vessels of the fleet, ahead of
Sister Sue
now after the alteration of trajectory. Closest was the vividly green display of
Pride of Erin
. Grimes did not need to look into his radar screen to see that the range was closing, that
Sister Sue
would soon sweep past her. O’Leary’s spacemanship must almost be down to Hallicheki standards. And there was
Spaceways Princess
, scarlet, and
Agatha’s Ark
, blue. Grimes thought of perpetrating a pun about arclamps but thought better of it.

In the radar screen the tiny, distant spark that was the merchantman vanished but still showed in the MPI. So she was underway again.

“Stop her!” ordered Grimes, suiting the action to the words as far as his own ship was concerned. “Pass the order.”

“To all ships. Stop inertial drive,” he heard the Countess’s voice.

So Venner must now be at his battle console, thought Grimes.

“Mr. Williams,” he said, “set up the graticules and graduations in the main MPI. Let me know how much, if at all, I must come around to keep the target ahead . . .”

“Aye, aye, Skipper!”

“Ms. Connellan, stand by the NST transceiver . . .”

“But we’ll not be needing it for a long while yet. Sir.”

“Stand by the NST!”

That would keep her from getting underfoot.

“We’re lucky, Skipper!” he heard Williams say. “Just bring her right ahead, and keep her there, and we’ve got her!”

“Good. To all ships, Ms. Walshingham. Put target ahead. Restart all drives. General chase!”

There was again the brief period of complete disorientation as the temporal precession field built up, as the tumbling, processing gyroscopes of the drive dragged the ship with them into her own warped continuum.

And again Grimes heard the ballad of Captain Kidd.

And what can I do about it?
he asked himself.
What can I do about it? Captains, even privateer captains, don’t go around murdering their senior officers . . .

But Captain Kidd had done so.

Chapter 47

IT IS AXIOMATIC
that a stern chase is a long chase.

The chase would have been a very long one, and quite possibly unsuccessful, had not Survey Service pattern governors—obtained from whom, and at what expense?—been fitted to the Mannschenn Drive units of the four ships when, at Port Kane, the other modifications had been made. With this hyperdrive in operation things were uncomfortable. There was always the feeling of walking a thin, swaying wire over an abyss that was the Past, maintaining balance with extreme difficulty. There was the frightening knowledge—in Grimes’ mind at least—that he and all aboard
Sister Sue
, as was the ship herself, were at the mercy of a swirling field of force and of the man controlling—trying to control!—it. But Malleson was better than highly competent. He was designer as well as engineer. He knew—Grimes hoped—what he was doing. He would allow not the slightest fluctuation of field strength.