First Command (19 page)

First Mate of
Corgi:
Watch it, you stupid bastard!

Second Mate of
Corgi:
Who’re you calling a bastard? You can sling your rank around aboard the bloody ship, but not here. If I’d had any sense I’d’a skinned out before the bitch lifted off. Morrowvia’ll do me when I retire from the Dog Star Line! Or resign . . .

First Mate of
Corgi:
Or get fired—as you will be, unless you pipe down!

Second Mate of
Corgi:
You can’t tell me . . .

First Mate of
Corgi:
I can, and I bloody well am telling you! Come on, finish your drink, and then back to the ship!

At this juncture there are sounds of a scuffle as
Corgi’s
chief officer, a very big man, hustles his junior out of the Red Dragon.

Third Mate of
Pomeranian:
What the hell was all
that
about?

First Mate of
Pomeranian:
Search me.

The rest of the recorded conversation consists of idle and futile speculation by
Pomeranian’s
officers as to the identity of the world landed upon by
Corgi.

To date I have been unable to identify this planet myself. There is no Morrowvia listed in the catalogue, even when due allowance is made for variations in spelling. Also I have checked the Navy List, and found that the master of
Corgi
is not, and never has been, an officer in the FSS Reserve. None of his officers hold a Reserve commission. It may be assumed, therefore, that the master’s report on the discovery of what appears to be a Lost Colony will be made only to his owners.
Corgi,
when she deviated, was bound from Darnstadt to Siluria. Her normal trajectory would have taken her within three light-years of Gamma Argo. The planetary system of Gamma Argo was surveyed in the early days of the Second Expansion, and no indigenous intelligent life was found on any of its worlds . . . .

“Mphm . . .” Grimes refilled and relit his pipe. This was interesting reading.

He turned to the report from the agent at Port Brrooun. He, the shipping advisor to the Terran Consul, had been spending most of his free evenings in an establishment called the Beer Hive. Brrooun had been
Corgi’s
next port of call after Llangowan. Her second officer had confined his troubles to a sympathetic Shaara drone. At Port Mackay, on Rob Roy, he had gotten fighting drunk on the local whiskey and had beaten up the chief officer and publicly abused the master. Normally such conduct would have led to his instant dismissal—but Captain Danzellan,
Corgi,
had been most reluctant to leave the objectionable young man behind, in the hands of the civil authorities. The Intelligence Officer at Port Mackay, although knowing nothing of the Lost Colony, had been intrigued by the failure of the master to rid himself of an obvious malcontent and had wondered what was behind it. His own theories, for what they were worth, included a Hanoverian plot against the Jacobean royal house of Waverley . . . . It was from Port Fortinbras, on Elsinore, that the next really interesting report came. The agent there was a woman, and worked as a waitress in the Poor Yorick, a tavern famous for its funereal decor. The agent, too, was famous insofar as the Intelligence Branch of the Survey Service was concerned, being known as the Bug Queen. Her specialty was recorders printed into the labels on bottles.

Transcript of conversation between Harold Larsen, owner-manager of Larsen’s Repair Yard, and Peter Dalquist, owner of Dalquist’s Ship Chandlery:

Dalquist: An’ how are things at the yard, Harald?

Larsen: Can’t complain, Pete, can’t complain.
Southerly Buster’s
havin’ a face lift.

Dalquist: Drongo Kane . . .

Larsen: You can say what you like about Drongo—but he always pays his bills . . .

Dalquist: Yeah. But he drives a hard bargain first.

Larsen: You can say that again.

Dalquist: An’ what is it this time? General maintenance? Survey?

Larsen: Modifications. He’s havin’ his cargo spaces converted into passenger accommodation—of a sort. An’ you remember those two quick-firin’ cannon I got off that derelict Waldegren gunboat? Drongo’s havin ‘em mounted on the
Buster.

Dalquist: But it ain’t legal.
Southerly Buster’s
a merchant ship.

Larsen: Drongo says that it
is
legal, an’ that he’s entitled to carry defensive armament . . . . Some o’ the places he gets to, he needs it! But I checked up with me own legal eagles just to make sure that me own jets are clear. They assured me that Drongo’s within his rights.

Dalquist: But quick-firin’ cannon, when every man-o’-war is armed to the teeth with laser, misguided missiles an’ only the Odd Gods of the Galaxy know what else! Doesn’t make sense.

Larsen: Maybe it doesn’t—but Drongo’s got too much sense to take on a warship.

Dalquist: What if a warship takes on
him?

Larsen: That’s
his
worry.

Dalquist: But he must be thinkin’ of fightin’ somebody . . . . Any idea who it might be?

Larsen: I haven’t a clue. All that I know is that his last port, before he came here, was Brrooun, on one o’ the Shaara worlds. He told me—he’d had rather too much to drink himself—that he’d fed a couple of bottles of Scotch to a talkative drone. He said that he’ll buy drinks for anybody—or anything—as long as he gets information in return. Anyhow, this drone told Drongo what
he’d
been told by the drunken second mate of a Dog Star tramp.

Dalquist: Which was?

Larsen: Drongo certainly wasn’t telling me, even though he’d had a skinful. He did mutter something about Lost Colonies, an’ finders bein’ keepers, an’ about the Dog Star Line havin’ to be manned by greyhounds if they wanted to get their dirty paws into
this
manger . . .

Dalquist: An’ was that all?

Larsen: You said it. He clammed up.

Unfortunately Captain Kane and his officers, unlike the majority of spacemen visiting Port Fortinbras, do not frequent the Poor Yorick, preferring the King Claudius. On the several occasions that I have been there as a customer, at the same times as
Southerly Buster’s
personnel, I have been unable to learn anything of importance. Attempts made by myself to strike up an acquaintance with Captain Kane, his mates and his engineers have failed.

Grimes chuckled. He wondered what the Bug Queen looked like. It seemed obvious that she owed her success as an agent to her skill with electronic gadgetry rather than to her glamour. But Kane? Where did
he
come into the picture? The man was notorious—but, to date, had always managed to stay on the right side of the law.

But it was time that he, Grimes, put his senior officers into the picture.

3

They were all in Grimes’s day cabin—
his departmental heads and his senior scientific officers. There was Saul, the first lieutenant, a huge, gentle, very black man. There was Connery, chief engineer. The two officers in charge of communications were there—Timmins, the electronicist, and Hayakawa, the psionicist. There were Doctors Tallis, Westover and Lazenby—biologist, geologist and ethologist respectively—all of whom held the rank of full commander. Forsby—physicist—had yet to gain his doctorate and was only a lieutenant. There were Lieutenant Pitcher, navigator, Lieutenant Stein, ship’s surgeon and biochemist, and Captain Philby, officer in charge of
Seeker’
s Marines.

Grimes, trying to look and to feel fatherly, surveyed his people. He was pleased to note that the
real
spacemen—with the exception of Hayakawa—looked the part. Ethnic origins and differentiation of skin pigmentation were canceled out, as it were, by the common uniform. With the exception of Maggie Lazenby the scientists looked their part. They were, of course, all in uniform—though it wasn’t what they were wearing but how they were wearing it that mattered. To them uniform was just something to cover their nakedness, the more comfortably the better. And to them beards were merely the means whereby the bother of depilation could be avoided. The growths sprouting from the faces of Tallis, Westover and Forsby contrasted shockingly with the neat hirsute adornments sported by Connery and Stein. The only one of the scientists at whom it was a pleasure to look was Doctor Lazenby—slim, auburn-haired and wearing a skirt considerably less than regulation length.

Grimes looked at her.

She snapped, “Get on with it, John.” (Everybody present knew that she was a privileged person.)

“Mphm,” he grunted as he carefully filled his pipe. “Help yourselves to coffee—or to something stronger from the bar, if you’d rather.” He waited until everybody was holding a glass or a cup, then said, “As you all know by this time, this is a Lost Colony expedition . . . .”

Forsby raised his hand for attention. “Captain, forgive my ignorance, but I’ve only just joined the Survey Service. And I’m a physicist, not a historian. Just what
is
a Lost Colony?”

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes again. He shot a dirty look at Maggie Lazenby as he heard her whispered
“Keep it short!”
He carefully lit his pipe. He said, “The majority of the so-called Lost Colonies date from the days of the Second Expansion, of the gaussjammers. The gaussjammers were interstellar ships that used the Ehrenhaft Drive. Cutting a long and involved story short, the Ehrenhaft generators produced a magnetic current—a current, not a field—and the ship in which they were mounted became, in effect, a huge magnetic particle, proceeding at a speed which could be regulated from a mere crawl to FTL along the ‘tramlines,’ the lines of magnetic force. This was all very well—but a severe magnetic storm could throw a gaussjammer light-years off course, very often into an unexplored and uncharted sector of the galaxy . . . .”

“FTL?” demanded Forsby in a pained voice. “FTL?”

“A matter of semantics,” Grimes told him airily. “You know, and I know, that faster-than-light speeds are impossible. With our Mannschenn Drive, for example, we cheat—by going astern in time as we’re going ahead in space. The gaussjammers cheated too—by coexisting with themselves all along the lines of magnetic force that they were on. The main thing was—it worked. Anyhow, visualize a gaussjammer after a magnetic storm has tangled the lines of force like so much spaghetti
and
drained the micro-pile of all energy. The captain doesn’t know where he is. But he has got power for his main engines.”

“You said that the micro-pile was dead.”

“Sure. But those ships ran to emergency generators—diesel generators. They churned out the electricity to drive the Ehrenhaft generators. The ship’s biochemist knew the techniques for producing diesel fuel from whatever was available—even though it meant that all hands would be on short rations. So, for as long as she could, the ship either tried to make her way back to some known sector or to find a planet capable of being settled . . . .”

“Analogous,” contributed Maggie Lazenby, “to the colonization of many Pacific islands by Polynesians in Earth’s remote past. But this colony that we’re supposed to be looking for, John . . .”

“Yes. I was getting around to that. It’s supposed to be in the Argo Sector. It was stumbled upon by a Dog Star Line ship that made a deviation to recalibrate her Mannschenn Drive controls. It won’t be a Lost Colony for much longer.”

“Why not?” asked Forsby.

“To begin with, the Dog Star Line people know about it. The Shaara know about it.
We
know about it. And Drongo Kane knows about it.”

“Drongo Kane?” This was Forsby again, of course. “Who’s he?”

Grimes sighed. He supposed that his physicist knew his own subject, but he seemed to know very little outside it. He turned his regard to his officers, said, “Tell him.”

“Drongo Kane . . .” murmured Saul in his deep, rich voice. “Smuggler, gunrunner . . .”

“Pirate . . .” contributed Timmins.

“That was never proven,” Grimes told him.

“Perhaps not, sir. But I was on watch—it was when I was a junior in
Scorpio—
when
Bremerhaven’s
distress call came through.”

“Mphm. As I recall it,
Bremerhaven’s
own activities at the time were somewhat dubious . . . .”

“Slaver . . .” said Saul.

“Somebody had to take the people off Ganda before the radiation from their sun fried them. Whatever ships were available had to be employed.”

“But Kane
was paid
by the Duke of Waldegren for the people he carried in
Southerly Buster.”

“Just a fee,” said Grimes, “or commission, or whatever, for the delivery of indentured labor.”

“What about this bloody Lost Colony?” demanded Maggie Lazenby.

“We’re supposed to find it.” Grimes gestured toward the folder on his desk with the stem of his pipe. “I’ve had copies made of all the bumf that was given to me. It consists mainly of reports made by agents on quite a few worlds. Our man at Port Llangowan, on Siluria, recorded a conversation between officers
of Corgi
and
Pomeranian
in one of the local pubs.
Corgi
had found this world—which seems to be called Morrowvia—quite by chance. Our man at Port Brrooun, on Drroomoorr, recorded a conversation between the second mate of
Corgi
and a Shaara drone; once again Morrowvia was mentioned. The same young gentleman—the second mate, not the drone—got into trouble at Port Mackay on Rob Roy. Normally he’d have been emptied out there and then by
Corgi’s
master—but keeping him on board must have been the lesser of two evils.”

“Why?” asked Forsby.

“Because,” Grimes told him patiently, “the master of
Corgi
didn’t want word of a new world that could well be included in the Dog Star Line’s economic empire spread all over the galaxy. Where was I? Yes. Our woman at Port Fortinbras, on Elsinore, recorded a conversation between the owner of a repair yard and the owner of a ship chandlery. The repair yard was doing some work on Drongo Kane’s ship,
Southerly Buster—
the mounting of armament, among other things. Kane had told the owner of the yard something—not much, but something—about a Lost Colony found by a Dog Star tramp . . . .”