To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga (13 page)

Grimes did as he was told. He had made his protest, such as it was, and, he had to admit, he was in favor of continuing the battle. It was a matter of simple justice. Why should one shipload of murderers be destroyed, and the other shipload escape unscathed? He was still more than a little dubious of the legality of it all, but he did not let it worry him.

He helped Craven to line the ship up on the target star, a yellow, fifth magnitude spark. He manned the intercom while the Captain poured on the acceleration and then, with the ship again falling free, cut in the Mannschenn Drive. When the vessel was on course he expected that the Old Man would give the usual order—“Normal Deep Space routine, Mr. Grimes,”—but this was not forthcoming.

“Now,” said Craven ominously.

“Now
what,
sir?”

“You have a short memory, Ensign. A conveniently short memory, if I may say so. Mind you, I was favorably impressed by the way you handled your armament, but that has no bearing upon what happened before.”

Grimes blushed miserably. He knew what the Captain was driving at. But, playing for time, he asked, “What do you mean, sir?”

Craven exploded. “What do I mean? You have the crust to sit there and ask me that! Your snooping, sir. Your violation of privacy. Even worse, your violation of the Master’s privacy! I shall not tell Miss Pentecost; it would be unkind to embarrass her. But . . .”

Grimes refrained from saying that he had seen Miss Pentecost wearing even less than when, inadvertently, he had spied upon her. He muttered, “I can explain, sir.”

“You’d better. Out with it.”

“Well, sir, it was like this. I knew that we’d stumbled on the enemy—or that the enemy had stumbled upon us. I’d sounded Action Stations. And when you were a long time coming up to Control I thought that you must have hurt yourself, somehow . . . there have been such cases, as you know. So I thought I’d better check—”

“You thought . . .
you
thought. I’ll not say that you aren’t paid to think—because that’s just what an officer
is
paid for. But you didn’t think hard enough, or along the right lines.” Grimes could see that Craven had accepted his explanation and that all would be well. The Captain’s full beard could not hide the beginnings of a smile. “Did you ever hear of Sir Francis Drake, Ensign?”

“No, sir.”

“He was an admiral—one of Queen Elizabeth’s admirals. The first Elizabeth, of course. When the Spanish Armada was sighted he did not rush down to his flagship yelling ‘Action Stations!’ He knew that there was time to spare, and so he quietly finished what he was doing before setting sail.”

“And what was he doing, sir?” asked Grimes innocently.

Craven glared at him, then snapped, “Playing bowls.”

Then, suddenly, the tension was broken and both men collapsed in helpless laughter. In part it was reaction to the strain of battle—but in greater part it was that freemasonry that exists only between members of the same sex, the acknowledgment of shared secrets and shared experiences.

Grimes knew that Jane Pentecost was not for him—and wished Craven joy of her and she of the Captain. Perhaps they had achieved a permanent relationship, perhaps not—but, either way, his best wishes were with them.

Craven unbuckled his seat strap.

“Deep Space routine, Mr. Grimes. It is your watch, I believe.”

“Deep Space routine it is, sir.”

Yes, it was still his watch (although so much had happened). It was still his watch, although there were barely fifteen minutes to go before relief. He was tired, more tired than he had ever been in his life before. He was tired, but not unhappy. He knew that the fact that he had killed men should be weighing heavily upon his conscience—but it did not. They, themselves, had been killers—and they had had a far better chance than any of their own victims had enjoyed.

He would shed no tears for them.

19

CRAVEN CAME BACK to the Control Room at the change of watch, when Grimes was handing over to Jane Pentecost. He waited until the routine had been completed, then said, “We know where our friends are headed. They were, like us, running for Waldegren—but they’re having to change course.” He laughed harshly. “There must be all hell let loose on their home planet.”

“Why? What’s happened?” asked Grimes.

“I’ll tell you later. But, first of all, we have an alteration of course ourselves. Look up Dartura in the Directory, will you, while I get the Drive shut down.”

Epsilon Sextans
was falling free through normal spacetime before Grimes had found the necessary information. And then there was the hunt for and the final identification of the target star, followed by the lining up by the use of the directional gyroscopes. There was the brief burst of acceleration and then, finally, the interstellar drive was cut in once more.

The Captain made a business of selecting and lighting a cigar. When the pungent combustion was well under way he said, “Our young Mr. Summers is a good snooper. Not as good as some people I know, perhaps.” Grimes flushed and Jane Pentecost looked puzzled. “He’s a super-sensitive. He let me have a full transcript of all the signals, out and in. It took us a little time to get them sorted out—but not too long, considering.
Adler—
that’s the name of the surviving frigate—
was
running for home. Her Captain sent a rather heavily edited report of the action to his Admiral. It seems that
Adler
and the unfortunate
Albatross
were set upon and beaten up by a heavily armed Survey Service cruiser masquerading as an innocent merchantman. The Admiral, oddly enough, doesn’t want a squadron of Survey Service battlewagons laying nuclear eggs on his base. So
Adler
has been told to run away and lose herself until the flap’s over. . . .”

“And did they send all that
en clair?”
demanded Grimes. “They must be mad!”

“No, they aren’t mad. The signal’s weren’t
en clair.”

“But . . .”

“Reliable merchant captains,” said Craven, “are often entrusted with highly confidential naval documents. There were some such in my safe aboard
Delta Orionis,
consigned to the Commanding Officer of Lindisfarne Base. The officer who delivered them to me is an old friend and shipmate of mine, and he told me that among them was the complete psionic code used by the Waldegren Navy. Well, when I had decided to take over this ship, I’d have been a bloody fool not to have Photostatted the whole damned issue.

“So that’s the way of it. Herr Kapitan von Leidnitz thinks he can say what he likes to his superiors without anybody else knowing what he’s saying. And all the while . . .” Craven grinned wolfishly. “It seems that there’s a minor base, of sorts, on Dartura. Little more than repair yards, although I suppose that there’ll be a few batteries for their protection. I can imagine the sort of personnel they have running the show—passed-over commanders and the like, not overly bright. By the time that we get there we shall have concocted a convincing story—convincing enough to let us hang off in orbit until
Adler
appears on the scene. After all, we have their precious code. Why should they suspect us?”

“Why shouldn’t
we
be
Adler?”
asked Grimes.

“What do you mean, Ensign?”

“The Waldegren Navy’s frigates are almost identical, in silhouette, with the Commission’s
Epsilon
class freighters. We could disguise this ship a little by masking the dissimilarities by a rough patching of plating. After all,
Adler
was in action and sustained some damage—”

“Complicated,” mused the Captain. “Too complicated. And two
Adlers—
each, presumably, in encoded psionic communication with both Waldegren and Dartura. . . . You’ve a fine, devious mind, young Grimes—but I’m afraid you’ve out-foxed yourself on that one.”

“Let me talk, sir. Let me think out loud. To begin with—a ship running on Mannschenn Drive
can
put herself into orbit about a planet, but it’s not, repeat not, recommended.”

“Damn right it’s not.”

“But we have the heels
of Adler?
Yes? Then we could afford a slight delay to carry out the modifications—the disguise—that I’ve suggested. After all, forty odd light years is quite a long way.”

“But what do we gain, Mr. Grimes?”

“The element of confusion, sir. Let me work it out. We disguise ourselves as well as we can. We find out, from intercepted and decoded signals,
Adler’s
ETA—
and
the coordinates of her breakthrough into the normal continuum. We contrive matters to be more or less in the same place at exactly the same time. And when the shore batteries and the guardships see no less than two
Adlers
slugging it out, each of them yelling for help in the secret code, they won’t know which of us to open fire on.”

“Grimes,” said Craven slowly, “I didn’t know you had it in you. All I can say is that I’m glad that you’re on
our
side.”

“Am I?” asked Grimes wonderingly, suddenly deflated. He looked at the Captain who, after all, was little better than a pirate, whose accomplice he had become. He looked at the girl, but for whom he would not be here. “Am I? Damn it all, whose side
am
I on?”

“You’d better go below,” Craven told him gently. “Go below and get some sleep. You need it. You’ve earned it.”

“Jeremy,” said Jane Pentecost to Craven, “would you mind looking after the shop for half an hour or so? I’ll go with John.”

“As you please, my dear. As you please.”

It was the assurance in the Captain’s voice that hurt.
It won’t make any difference to us, it
implied.
It can’t make any difference. Sure, Jane, go ahead. Throw the nice little doggie a bone. . . . we can spare it.

“No thank you,” said Grimes coldly, and left the Control Room.

But he couldn’t hate these people.

20

AFTER A LONG SLEEP
Grimes felt better. After a meal he felt better still. It was a good meal, even though the solid portion of it came from tins. Craven’s standards were slipping, thought the Ensign. He was reasonably sure that such items as caviar, escargots, pâé de foie gras, Virginia ham, Brie, and remarkably alcoholic cherries were not included in the Commission’s inventory of emergency stores. And neither would be the quite reasonable Montrachet, although it had lost a little by being decanted from its original bottles into standard squeeze bulbs. But if the Captain had decided that the laborer was worthy of his hire, with the consignees of the cargo making their contribution toward that hire, that was his privilege . . .? Responsibility?—call it what you will.

Jane Pentecost watched him eat. As he was finishing his coffee she said, “Now that our young lion has fed, he is required in the Control Room.”

He looked at her both gratefully and warily. “What have I done now?”

“Nothing, my dear. It is to discuss what you—we—will do. Next.”

He followed her to Control. Craven was there, of course, and so were Baxter and Summers. The Captain was enjoying one of his rank cigars, and a limp, roll-your-own cigarette dangled from the engineer’s lower lip. The telepath coughed pointedly every time that acrid smoke expelled by either man drifted his way. Neither paid any attention to him, and neither did Grimes when he filled and lighted his own pipe.

Craven said, “I’ve been giving that scheme of yours some thought. It’s a good one.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. I should thank you. Mr. Summers, here, has been maintaining a careful listening watch.
Adler’s
ETA is such that we can afford to shut down the Drive to make the modifications that you suggest. To begin with, we’ll fake patching plates with plastic sheets—we can’t afford to cannibalize any more of the ship’s structure—so as to obscure our name and identification letters. We’ll use more plastic to simulate missile launchers and laser projectors—luckily there’s plenty of it in the cargo.”

“We found more than plastic while we were lookin’ for it,” said the engineer, licking his lips.

“That will do, Mr. Baxter. Never, in normal circumstances, should I have condoned . . .”

“These circumstances ain’t normal, Skipper, an’ we all bloody well know it.”

“That will do, I say.” Craven inhaled deeply, then filled the air of the Control Room with a cloud of smoke that, thought Grimes, would have reflected laser even at close range. Summers almost choked, and Jane snapped, “Jeremy!”

“This, my dear, happens to be
my
Control Room.” He turned again to the Ensign. “It will not be necessary, Mr. Grimes, to relocate the real weapons. They functioned quite efficiently where they are and, no doubt, will do so again. And now, as soon as I have shut down the Drive, I shall hand the watch over to you. You are well rested and refreshed.”

“Come on,” said Jane to Baxter. “Let’s get suited up and get that sheeting out of the airlock.”

“Couldn’t Miss Pentecost hold the fort, sir?” asked Grimes. He added, “I’ve been through the camouflage course at the Academy.”

“And so have I, Mr. Grimes. Furthermore, Miss Pentecost has had experience in working outside, but I don’t think that you have.”

“No, sir. But . . . “

“That will be all, Mr. Grimes.”

At Craven’s orders the Drive was shut down, and outside the viewports the sparse stars became stars again, were no longer pulsing spirals of multi-colored light. Then, alone in Control, Grimes actuated his scanners so that he could watch the progress of the work outside the hull, and switched on the transceiver that worked on the spacesuit frequency.

This time he ran no risk of being accused of being a Peeping Tom.

He had to admire the competence with which his shipmates worked. The plastic sheeting had no mass to speak of, but it was awkward stuff to handle. Torches glowed redly as it was cut, and radiated invisibly in the infrared as it was shaped and welded. The workers, in their bulky, clumsy suits, moved with a grace that was in startling contrast to their attire—a Deep Space ballet, thought Grimes, pleasurably surprised at his own way with words. From the speaker of the transceiver came Craven’s curt orders, the brief replies of the others.