First Command (32 page)

He said to Saul, “Cease fire.”

“But, sir, I could put that turret out of action . . . .”

“I said, cease fire.”

Seeker’s
hammering guns fell silent. There was a last burst from the
Buster’s
automatics, a last noisy rattle of shrapnel around
Seeker’s
control room. From the transceiver came Dreebly’s taunting voice, “Chicken!”

“She’s lifting,” said Pitcher.

“She’s lifting,” echoed Saul disgustedly.

“Secure all,” ordered Grimes, hurrying to the pilot’s chair. “Secure all! There will be no further warning!”

He heard the coded shrilling of the alarms as he belted himself in. He checked the telltale lights on the control panel before him. By the time that the inertial drive was ready to lift
Seeker
clear of the ground
Southerly Buster
would be beyond pursuit range.

Was everything secure? It would be just too bad if it wasn’t. The trained spacemen he could trust to obey orders promptly, the scientists were a different kettle of fish. But he couldn’t afford to worry about them now, could not afford to indulge in the archaic, time-consuming, regulation ritual of the countdown.

He pushed the button for full emergency rocket power—and almost immediately tons of reaction mass exploded from the Venturis in incandescent steam. The giant hand of acceleration slammed him deep down into the padding of his seat.
Seeker
was lifting.
Seeker
was up and away, shooting skyward like a shell fired from some gigantic cannon. She overtook the slow-climbing
Southerly Buster,
roared past her as though she were standing still, left her well astern.

On the console the telltale light of the inertial drive was now glowing green. Grimes cut his rockets and the ship dropped sickening until the I.D. took hold, then brought up with a jar. She shuddered in every member as Grimes applied lateral thrust, as she lurched sideways across the sky. Pitcher, who had realized what the captain was trying to do, was doing, had stationed himself by the radar. “A little more, sir,” he called. “Easy, now, easy . . . .” Then, “hold her at that!”

“Hold her!” repeated Grimes.

The ship shuddered and groaned again, but he was holding her in position relative to the ground below, to the still-climbing
Southerly Buster.
Then—slowly, but not so slowly as to conceal his intentions—he reduced vertical thrust. Dreebly tried, but in vain, to wriggle past
Seeker.
Grimes anticipated every move. (Later he learned that Hayakawa had been feeding him information, that Myra Bracegirdle, loyal rather to her sex than to her ship, had worked with and not against her fellow telepath.) It seemed that he could not go wrong—and every time that Dreebly attempted a lateral shift
Southerly Buster
fell victim to the parallelogram of forces, inevitably lost altitude.

At last it was obvious to Mr. Dreebly that he had only two choices. Either he could return to the surface, or he could commit suicide by crushing his control room and everybody in it against
Seeker’s
far less vulnerable stern. He was not in a suicidal mood.

Grimes could not resist the temptation. He called for a microphone and for a hookup to the
Buster’s
transceiver. He said just one word, and that with insufferable smugness.

“Chicken!”

Slowly the two ships dropped through the night—
Southerly Buster
cowed and inferior. Apart from that one taunt there had been no exchange of signals. Slowly they dropped, the defeated Dreebly and the overconfident Grimes.

It was this overconfidence that led, at the finish, to disaster. Just before Dreebly’s landing Grimes miscalculated, and his stern made brief contact with the
Buster’s
stem, doing her no great damage but throwing her off balance. With all his faults, Dreebly was a superb shiphandler. He fought to correct the topple, and had he not been inhibited by the ominous bulk of the other vessel hanging immediately above his control room he might well have done so.
Southerly Buster’s
fall was not completely catastrophic, but it was a fall, nonetheless. Visibly shuddering, she tilted, further and further, until her long axis was parallel to the ground.

It was then that Dreebly lost control, and there was a tinny crash as she dropped the last half meter.

24

It was, Grimes admitted glumly
, quite a mess. Just how big a mess it was depended upon the legality or otherwise of his actions, the illegality or otherwise of Kane’s operations. Legalities and illegalities notwithstanding, he was obliged to give assistance to the damaged—the wrecked—ship.

She was not a total write-off, although on a world with no repair yards it would be months before she could be made spaceworthy; she would probably have to be towed off-planet to somewhere where there were facilities. (And who would have to pay the bill? Kane would certainly take legal action against the Federation.)

Fortunately everybody aboard
Southerly Buster
had escaped serious injury, although the unfortunate women from Oxford, who had just been recovering consciousness at the time of the crash, were badly bruised and shaken. Them Grimes sent back to their town in
Seeker’s
boats.

He said to Saul, “I’ve done enough damage for one day. I’m turning in—for what’s left of the night.”

“The report to Base, sir . . . .”

Grimes told him coarsely what he could do to the report, then, “It will have to wait, Number One. I don’t want to stick my neck out in writing until I have a few more facts.”

“But you put down an attempt at slave trading, sir.”

“Mphm. I hope so. I sincerely hope so. But I’m afraid that the bastard Drongo has some dirty big ace up his sleeve. Oh, well. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I’m getting some shut-eye. Good night, Number One.”

“Good night, sir.”

Grimes went up to his quarters. He paused briefly in his day cabin, poured himself a stiff drink, downed it in one swallow. He felt a little better. He went through into his bedroom, and stiffened with astonishment in the doorway. Maya was there, curled up on the bed, her back to him. She was snoring gently—and then immediately was wide awake, rolling over to face him.

“Maya . . .” he said reprovingly.

“I had to sleep somewhere, John,” she told him, even more reprovingly. “And you seemed to have quite forgotten all about me.”

“Of course I hadn’t,” he lied.

“Of course you had,” she stated, without rancor. “But you had much more important things on your mind.” She was off the bed now and was sagging enticingly against him. She said, in a very small voice, “And I was frightened . . . .”

The scent of her was disturbing. It was not unpleasant but it was strange—yet somehow familiar. It was most definitely female. He said, “But you can’t sleep here. . . .”

“But I have been sleeping here, John. . . .” (So, she had begun to use his first name, too.) She pleaded, “Let me stay. . . .”

“But . . .”

Her hands, with their strangely short fingers, were playing with the seal-seam of his shirt, opening the garment. They were soft and caressing on the skin of his back, but her nails were very sharp. The sensation was stimulating rather than painful. He could feel her erect nipples against his chest. She pleaded again, “Let me stay. . . .” Against his conscious will his arms went about her. He lowered his head and his lips down to hers. Oddly, at first she did not seem to understand the significance of this, and then she responded avidly. All of her body was against him, and all of his body was vividly aware of it. He walked her slowly backward toward the bed, her legs moving in time with his. Through the thin material of his shorts he could feel the heat of her thighs. She collapsed slowly, almost bonelessly, onto the nest that she had made for herself with pillows and cushions. He let her pull him down beside her, made no attempt to stop her as she removed the last of his clothing. (For a woman who had never worn a garment in her life she was learning fast.)

Their mating was short, savage—and to Grimes strangely unsatisfying. What should have been there for him was not there; the tenderness that he had come to expect on such occasions was altogether lacking. There was not even the illusion of love; this had been no more than a brief, animal coupling.

But she,
he thought rather bitterly,
is not complaining.

She was not complaining.

She, immediately after the orgasmic conclusion of the act, was drifting into sleep, snuggled up against him.

She was purring.

25

Dog tired,
his nerves on edge after a sleepless night, Grimes stood in his control room and watched Drongo Kane come roaring in from the northward. He had been expecting Kane; Mr. Timmins had monitored the radio signals exchanged by Mr. Dreebly and his irate captain. He was expecting Maggie, too, but not for at least another hour. She had told him that Captain Danzellan was bringing her back to
Seeker.
She had refused to tell him what it was that she has discovered in the ancient records kept in Janine’s palace, saying, “It will keep.”

“Damn it all!” he had exploded, “I shall have Kane to deal with. And if what I suspect is true, legally I won’t have a leg to stand on. Not unless you can pull a rabbit out of the hat.”

“Not a rabbit,” she told him. “Most definitely not a
rabbit.”

And that was all that he could get from her.

He had made use of the ship’s memory bank encyclopedia facilities. In a Survey Service vessel these, of course, were continually kept up to date. He learned that although a committee was considering revisal, or even repeal, of the Non-Citizen Act this piece of legislation was still law. As far as he could see the act applied most specifically to the natives of Morrowvia—and that left him well and truly up the well known creek, without a paddle.

And here was Kane, dropping down from the morning sky, a man who knew Federation law so well that he could always bend it without actually breaking it. Here was Kane, a shipmaster
and
a shipowner who had learned that his vessel had been as good as (as bad as) wrecked by the officious actions of a relatively junior Survey Service officer. Here was Kane, more than a little annoyed about the frustration of his highly profitable activities.

Here was Kane.

Southerly Buster’s
pinnace slammed down alongside the parent ship in a flurry of dust and small debris. The door opened and Kane jumped out. He was no longer wearing his gaudy finery but had changed into utilitarian gray coveralls. Sabrina, still aglitter with jewelry, appeared in the doorway but Kane, irritably, motioned her back inside.

Dreebly, his head bandaged, came out of the ship. He stood there, drooping, while Kane obviously gave him a merciless dressing down. Then, slowly, the two men walked all around the crippled hulk, with the mate pointing out details of exterior damage. Grimes already knew what the damage was like inside—the Mannschenn Drive torn from its housing, the hydroponics tanks a stinking mess of shattered plastic and shredded greenery, most of the control room instruments inoperable if not completely ruined.

Saul came to stand by his captain’s side. They watched as Kane and Dreebly clambered into the near-wreck through an amidships cargo hatch. The first lieutenant said happily, “You certainly put paid to
his
account, sir.”

Grimes said, not so happily, “I only hope that he doesn’t put paid to mine . . . .”

“But, sir, the man’s a blackbirder, a slave trader! You’ve wrecked his ship—but that was the only way that you could stop the commission of a crime.”

“Strong measures, Mr. Saul—especially if there were no crime being committed.”

“But he fired on us, sir.”

“At, not on. And we fired at him first.”

“But he still hasn’t a leg to stand on . . . .”

“Hasn’t he? I’ve checked up on the Non-Citizen Act. I’m afraid that the Morrowvians do not qualify for citizenship. They have no rights whatsoever.”

“I don’t see it, sir. They’re backward, I suppose—but they’re as human as you or I.”

“They’re not,” Grimes told him. “They’re not, and that’s the bloody trouble. What do you know of the Non-Citizen Act, Mr. Saul?”

“Not much, sir. But I can check up on it.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll fill you in. That particular piece of legislation dates back to the bad old days when, briefly, the genetic engineers had far too much say. Although they were concerned primarily with the life sciences their outlook was that of engineers. You know, as well as I do, the peculiarities of the engineering outlook. If human beings and machines can’t work together with maximum efficiency—then modify the human to suit the machine, not the other way round. A planet, like a house, is a machine for living in. If it is not suited to its intending occupants—then modify the occupants to fit. Then the generic engineers took things further. They manufactured, in their laboratories, androids—beings of synthetic flesh and blood that were, in effect, artificial men and women. Then they made ‘underpeople’; the word was coined by a Twentieth Century science fiction writer called Cordwainer Smith and later, much later, used in actual fact. These underpeople were even less human than the androids, their very appearance making obvious their animal origins. They could not interbreed with true humans any more than the androids could—but they could breed, although they could not crossbreed. Put it this way—a dogman could mate with a dogwoman and fertilize her, or a catman with a catwoman. Only dogs—or ex-dogs—with dogs. Only cats—or ex-cats—with cats.

“Then there was the Android Revolt on Dancey. There was the virtual take-over of Tallis by the underpeople, although without bloodshed. The Federation Government put its foot down with a firm hand. No more androids were to be manufactured. No more underpeople were to be bred. All existing androids and underpeople were deprived of citizenship. And so on.

“It was quite some time before I realized the nature of the situation here, on Morrowvia. Kane, somehow, twigged it long before I did. But, last night, the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place with a quite deafening
click!
. I should have seen it before. There are so many clues . . . .”